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...previous

Secretary Powell's Press Conference
U.S. Department of State -- January 8, 2004

QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, can I try you on something a little less rosy than some of the things you cited? Iraq U.S. inspectors are pulling out. Carnegie, in a report today, says the threat was vastly exaggerated, Iraq posed no immediate danger to the U.S. They have some recommendations that the CIA Director's job be made a career job instead of a political appointee. A lot of probables, a lot of maybes were left out by senior officials in describing what intelligence had uncovered.

Looking ahead, but also looking back, would you -- would you have rephrased your speech to the UN, in light of all of this, if you had another chance?

- mark 2-10-2004 10:51 am [link]

Iraq's Arsenal Was Only on Paper
Since Gulf War, Nonconventional Weapons Never Got Past the Planning Stage
Washington Post -- January 7, 2004

By Barton Gellman
Full Text.

- mark 2-10-2004 11:06 am [link]

For Vietnam Vet Anthony Zinni, Another War on Shaky Territory
Washington Post -- December 23, 2003

seen at slacktivist

- mark 2-10-2004 11:09 am [link]

[Justification of the October 2002 NIE.]

Iraq's WMD Programs: Culling Hard Facts from Soft Myths
The Central Intelligence Agency -- 28 November 2003


- mark 2-10-2004 8:13 am [link]

STATEMENT BY DAVID KAY ON THE INTERIM PROGRESS REPORT ON THE ACTIVITIES OF THE IRAQ SURVEY GROUP (ISG)
Central Intelligence Agency -- October 2, 2003

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I welcome this opportunity to discuss with the Committee the progress that the Iraq Survey Group has made in its initial three months of its investigation into Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) programs.

I cannot emphasize too strongly that the Interim Progress Report, which has been made available to you, is a snapshot, in the context of an on-going investigation, of where we are after our first three months of work. The report does not represent a final reckoning of Iraq's WMD programs, nor are we at the point where we are prepared to close the file on any of these programs. While solid progress - I would say even remarkable progress considering the conditions that the ISG has had to work under - has been made in this initial period of operations, much remains to be done. We are still very much in the collection and analysis mode, still seeking the information and evidence that will allow us to confidently draw comprehensive conclusions to the actual objectives, scope, and dimensions of Iraq's WMD activities at the time of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Iraq's WMD programs spanned more than two decades, involved thousands of people, billions of dollars, and were elaborately shielded by security and deception operations that continued even beyond the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The very scale of this program when coupled with the conditions in Iraq that have prevailed since the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom dictate the speed at which we can move to a comprehensive understanding of Iraq's WMD activities.

We need to recall that in the 1991-2003 period the intelligence community and the UN/IAEA inspectors had to draw conclusions as to the status of Iraq's WMD program in the face of incomplete, and often false, data supplied by Iraq or data collected either by UN/IAEA inspectors operating within the severe constraints that Iraqi security and deception actions imposed or by national intelligence collection systems with their own inherent limitations. The result was that our understanding of the status of Iraq's WMD program was always bounded by large uncertainties and had to be heavily caveated. With the regime of Saddam Husayn at an end, ISG has the opportunity for the first time of drawing together all the evidence that can still be found in Iraq - much evidence is irretrievably lost - to reach definitive conclusions concerning the true state of Iraq's WMD program. It is far too early to reach any definitive conclusions and, in some areas, we may never reach that goal. The unique nature of this opportunity, however, requires that we take great care to ensure that the conclusions we draw reflect the truth to the maximum extent possible given the conditions in post-conflict Iraq.

We have not yet found stocks of weapons, but we are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war and our only task is to find where they have gone. We are actively engaged in searching for such weapons based on information being supplied to us by Iraqis.

Why are we having such difficulty in finding weapons or in reaching a confident conclusion that they do not exist or that they once existed but have been removed? Our search efforts are being hindered by six principal factors:

  1. From birth all of Iraq's WMD activities were highly compartmentalized within a regime that ruled and kept its secrets through fear and terror and with deception and denial built into each program;

  2. Deliberate dispersal and destruction of material and documentation related to weapons programs began pre-conflict and ran trans-to-post conflict;

  3. Post-OIF looting destroyed or dispersed important and easily collectable material and forensic evidence concerning Iraq's WMD program. As the report covers in detail, significant elements of this looting were carried out in a systematic and deliberate manner, with the clear aim of concealing pre-OIF activities of Saddam's regime;

  4. Some WMD personnel crossed borders in the pre/trans conflict period and may have taken evidence and even weapons-related materials with them;

  5. Any actual WMD weapons or material is likely to be small in relation to the total conventional armaments footprint and difficult to near impossible to identify with normal search procedures. It is important to keep in mind that even the bulkiest materials we are searching for, in the quantities we would expect to find, can be concealed in spaces not much larger than a two car garage;

  6. The environment in Iraq remains far from permissive for our activities, with many Iraqis that we talk to reporting threats and overt acts of intimidation and our own personnel being the subject of threats and attacks. In September alone we have had three attacks on ISG facilities or teams: The ISG base in Irbil was bombed and four staff injured, two very seriously; a two person team had their vehicle blocked by gunmen and only escaped by firing back through their own windshield; and on Wednesday, 24 September, the ISG Headquarters in Baghdad again was subject to mortar attack.

Supporting Images

Photo: Container with vials.
Click Image to Enlarge

Vials: A total of 97 vials-including those with labels consistent with the al Hakam cover stories of single-cell protein and biopesticides, as well as strains that could be used to produce BW agents-were recovered from a scientist's residence.

Photo: Lab equipment from a Mosque.
Click Image to Enlarge

Lab Equipment From Mosque.

Photo: Burned Documents Found at SAAD Center
Click Image to Enlarge

Burned Documents Found at SAAD Center: An exploitation team on a recent mission to the SAAD Center, part of the Baghdad New Nuclear Design Center, found massive looting and the remnants of deliberately destroyed documents. Other documents were left untouched, however, and recovered by the team

Photo: Storage room in basement of Revolutionary Command Council Headquarters. Burned frames of PC workstations visible on shelves.
Click Image to Enlarge

Storage room in basement of Revolutionary Command Council Headquarters. Burned frames of PC workstations visible on shelves. All rooms sharing walls with this storage room were untouched from fire or battle damage.

Photo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The basement historical files were systematically selected and destroyed.
Click Image to Enlarge

Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The basement historical files were systematically selected and destroyed.

What have we found and what have we not found in the first 3 months of our work?

We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002. The discovery of these deliberate concealment efforts have come about both through the admissions of Iraqi scientists and officials concerning information they deliberately withheld and through physical evidence of equipment and activities that ISG has discovered that should have been declared to the UN. Let me just give you a few examples of these concealment efforts, some of which I will elaborate on later:

  • A clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service that contained equipment subject to UN monitoring and suitable for continuing CBW research.

  • A prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of BW agents, that Iraqi officials working to prepare for UN inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the UN.

  • Reference strains of biological organisms concealed in a scientist's home, one of which can be used to produce biological weapons.

  • New research on BW-applicable agents, Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF), and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin were not declared to the UN.

  • Documents and equipment, hidden in scientists' homes, that would have been useful in resuming uranium enrichment by centrifuge and electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS).

  • A line of UAVs not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of  500 km, 350 km beyond the permissible limit.

  • Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited SCUD variant missiles, a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists have said they were told to conceal from the UN.

  • Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1000 km - well beyond the 150 km range limit imposed by the UN. Missiles of a 1000 km range would have allowed Iraq to threaten targets through out the Middle East, including Ankara, Cairo, and Abu Dhabi.

  • Clandestine attempts between late-1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to 1,300 km range ballistic missiles --probably the No Dong -- 300 km range anti-ship cruise missiles, and other prohibited military equipment.

In addition to the discovery of extensive concealment efforts, we have been faced with a systematic sanitization of documentary and computer evidence in a wide range of offices, laboratories, and companies suspected of WMD work. The pattern of these efforts to erase evidence - hard drives destroyed, specific files burned, equipment cleaned of all traces of use - are ones of deliberate, rather than random, acts. For example,

  • On 10 July 2003 an ISG team exploited the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) Headquarters in Baghdad. The basement of the main building contained an archive of documents situated on well-organized rows of metal shelving. The basement suffered no fire damage despite the total destruction of the upper floors from coalition air strikes. Upon arrival the exploitation team encountered small piles of ash where individual documents or binders of documents were intentionally destroyed. Computer hard drives had been deliberately destroyed. Computers would have had financial value to a random looter; their destruction, rather than removal for resale or reuse, indicates a targeted effort to prevent Coalition forces from gaining access to their contents.

  • All IIS laboratories visited by IIS exploitation teams have been clearly sanitized, including removal of much equipment, shredding and burning of documents, and even the removal of nameplates from office doors.

  • Although much of the deliberate destruction and sanitization of documents and records probably occurred during the height of OIF combat operations, indications of significant continuing destruction efforts have been found after the end of major combat operations, including entry in May 2003 of the locked gated vaults of the Ba'ath party intelligence building in Baghdad and highly selective destruction of computer hard drives and data storage equipment along with the burning of a small number of specific binders that appear to have contained financial and intelligence records, and in July 2003 a site exploitation team at the Abu Ghurayb Prison found one pile of the smoldering ashes from documents that was still warm to the touch.

I would now like to review our efforts in each of the major lines of enquiry that ISG has pursued during this initial phase of its work.

With regard to biological warfare activities, which has been one of our two initial areas of focus, ISG teams are uncovering significant information - including research and development of BW-applicable organisms, the involvement of Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) in possible BW activities, and deliberate concealment activities. All of this suggests Iraq after 1996 further compartmentalized its program and focused on maintaining smaller, covert capabilities that could be activated quickly to surge the production of BW agents.

Debriefings of IIS officials and site visits have begun to unravel a clandestine network of laboratories and facilities within the security service apparatus. This network was never declared to the UN and was previously unknown. We are still working on determining the extent to which this network was tied to large-scale military efforts or BW terror weapons, but this clandestine capability was suitable for preserving BW expertise, BW capable facilities and continuing R&D - all key elements for maintaining a capability for resuming BW production. The IIS also played a prominent role in sponsoring students for overseas graduate studies in the biological sciences, according to Iraqi scientists and IIS sources, providing an important avenue for furthering BW-applicable research. This was the only area of graduate work that the IIS appeared to sponsor.

Discussions with Iraqi scientists uncovered agent R&D work that paired overt work with nonpathogenic organisms serving as surrogates for prohibited investigation with pathogenic agents. Examples include: B. Thurengiensis (Bt) with B. anthracis (anthrax), and medicinal plants with ricin. In a similar vein, two key former BW scientists, confirmed that Iraq under the guise of legitimate activity developed refinements of processes and products relevant to BW agents. The scientists discussed the development of improved, simplified fermentation and spray drying capabilities for the simulant Bt that would have been directly applicable to anthrax, and one scientist confirmed that the production line for Bt could be switched to produce anthrax in one week if the seed stock were available.

A very large body of information has been developed through debriefings, site visits, and exploitation of captured Iraqi documents that confirms that Iraq concealed equipment and materials from UN inspectors when they returned in 2002. One noteworthy example is a collection of reference strains that ought to have been declared to the UN. Among them was a vial of live C. botulinum Okra B. from which a biological agent can be produced. This discovery - hidden in the home of a BW scientist - illustrates the point I made earlier about the difficulty of locating small stocks of material that can be used to covertly surge production of deadly weapons. The scientist who concealed the vials containing this agent  has identified a large cache of agents that he was asked, but refused, to conceal. ISG is actively searching for this second cache.

Additional information is beginning to corroborate reporting since 1996 about human testing activities using chemical and biological substances, but progress in this area is slow given the concern of knowledgeable Iraqi personnel about their being prosecuted for crimes against humanity.

We have not yet been able to corroborate the existence of a mobile BW production effort. Investigation into the origin of and intended use for the two trailers found in northern Iraq in April has yielded a number of explanations, including hydrogen, missile propellant, and BW production, but technical limitations would prevent any of these processes from being ideally suited to these trailers. That said, nothing we have discovered rules out their potential use in BW production.

We have made significant progress in identifying and locating individuals who were reportedly involved in a mobile program, and we are confident that we will be able to get an answer to the questions as to whether there was a mobile program and whether the trailers that have been discovered so far were part of such a program.

Let me turn now to chemical weapons (CW). In searching for retained stocks of chemical munitions, ISG has had to contend with the almost unbelievable scale of Iraq's conventional weapons armory, which dwarfs by orders of magnitude the physical size of any conceivable stock of chemical weapons. For example, there are approximately 130 known Iraqi Ammunition Storage Points (ASP), many of which exceed 50 square miles in size and hold an estimated 600,000 tons of artillery shells, rockets, aviation bombs and other ordinance. Of these 130 ASPs, approximately 120 still remain unexamined. As Iraqi practice was not to mark much of their chemical ordinance and to store it at the same ASPs that held conventional rounds, the size of the required search effort is enormous.

While searching for retained weapons, ISG teams have developed multiple sources that indicate that Iraq explored the possibility of CW production in recent years, possibly as late as 2003. When Saddam had asked a senior military official in either 2001 or 2002 how long it would take to produce new chemical agent and weapons, he told ISG that after he consulted with CW experts in OMI he responded it would take six months for mustard. Another senior Iraqi chemical weapons expert in responding to a request in mid-2002 from Uday Husayn for CW for the Fedayeen Saddam estimated that it would take two months to produce mustard and two years for Sarin.

We are starting to survey parts of Iraq's chemical industry to determine if suitable equipment and bulk chemicals were available for chemical weapons production. We have been struck that two senior Iraqi officials volunteered that if they had been ordered to resume CW production Iraq would have been willing to use stainless steel systems that would be disposed of after a few production runs, in place of corrosive-resistant equipment which they did not have.

We continue to follow leads on Iraq's acquisition of equipment and bulk precursors suitable for a CW program. Several possibilities have emerged and are now being exploited. One example involves a foreign company with offices in Baghdad, that imported in the past into Iraq dual-use equipment and maintained active contracts through 2002. Its Baghdad office was found looted in August 2003, but we are pursuing other locations and associates of the company.

Information obtained since OIF has identified several key areas in which Iraq may have engaged in proscribed or undeclared activity since 1991, including research on a possible VX stabilizer, research and development for CW-capable munitions, and procurement/concealment of dual-use materials and equipment.

Multiple sources with varied access and reliability have told ISG that Iraq did not have a large, ongoing, centrally controlled CW program after 1991. Information found to date suggests that Iraq's large-scale capability to develop, produce, and fill new CW munitions was reduced - if not entirely destroyed - during Operations Desert Storm and Desert Fox, 13 years of UN sanctions and UN inspections. We are carefully examining dual-use, commercial chemical facilities to determine whether these were used or planned as alternative production sites.

We have also acquired information related to Iraq's CW doctrine and Iraq's war plans for OIF, but we have not yet found evidence to confirm pre-war reporting that Iraqi military units were prepared to use CW against Coalition forces. Our efforts to collect and exploit intelligence on Iraq's chemical weapons program have thus far yielded little reliable information on post-1991 CW stocks and CW agent production, although we continue to receive and follow leads related to such stocks. We have multiple reports that Iraq retained CW munitions made prior to 1991, possibly including mustard - a long-lasting chemical agent - but we have to date been unable to locate any such munitions.

With regard to Iraq's nuclear program, the testimony we have obtained from Iraqi scientists and senior government officials should clear up any doubts about whether Saddam still wanted to obtain nuclear weapons. They have told ISG that Saddam Husayn remained firmly committed to acquiring nuclear weapons. These officials assert that Saddam would have resumed nuclear weapons development at some future point. Some indicated a resumption after Iraq was free of sanctions. At least one senior Iraqi official believed that by 2000 Saddam had run out of patience with waiting for sanctions to end and wanted to restart the nuclear program. The Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) beginning around 1999 expanded its laboratories and research activities and increased its overall funding levels. This expansion may have been in initial preparation for renewed nuclear weapons research, although documentary evidence of this has not been found, and this is the subject of continuing investigation by ISG.

Starting around 2000, the senior Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) and high-level Ba'ath Party official Dr. Khalid Ibrahim Sa'id began several small and relatively unsophisticated research initiatives that could be applied to nuclear weapons development. These initiatives did not in-and-of themselves constitute a resumption of the nuclear weapons program, but could have been useful in developing a weapons-relevant science base for the long-term. We do not yet have information indicating whether a higher government authority directed Sa'id to initiate this research and, regretfully, Dr. Said was killed on April 8th during the fall of Baghdad when the car he was riding in attempted to run a Coalition roadblock.

Despite evidence of Saddam's continued ambition to acquire nuclear weapons, to date we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material. However, Iraq did take steps to preserve some technological capability from the pre-1991 nuclear weapons program.

  • According to documents and testimony of Iraqi scientists, some of the key technical groups from the pre-1991 nuclear weapons program remained largely intact, performing work on nuclear-relevant dual-use technologies within the Military Industrial Commission (MIC). Some scientists from the pre-1991 nuclear weapons program have told ISG that they believed that these working groups were preserved in order to allow a reconstitution of the nuclear weapons program, but none of the scientists could produce official orders or plans to support their belief.

  • In some cases, these groups performed work which could help preserve the science base and core skills that would be needed for any future fissile material production or nuclear weapons development.

  • Several scientists - at the direction of senior Iraqi government officials - preserved documents and equipment from their pre-1991 nuclear weapon-related research and did not reveal this to the UN/IAEA. One Iraqi scientist recently stated in an interview with ISG that it was a "common understanding" among the scientists that material was being preserved for reconstitution of nuclear weapons-related work.

The ISG nuclear team has found indications that there was interest, beginning in 2002, in reconstituting a centrifuge enrichment program. Most of this activity centered on activities of Dr. Sa'id that caused some of his former colleagues in the pre-1991 nuclear program to suspect that Dr. Sa'id, at least, was considering a restart of the centrifuge program. We do not yet fully understand Iraqi intentions, and the evidence does not tie any activity directly to centrifuge research or development.

Exploitation of additional documents may shed light on the projects and program plans of Dr. Khalid Ibrahim Sa'id. There may be more projects to be discovered in research placed at universities and private companies. Iraqi interest in reconstitution of a uranium enrichment program needs to be better understood through the analysis of procurement records and additional interviews.

With regard to delivery systems, the ISG team has discovered sufficient evidence to date to conclude that the Iraqi regime was committed to delivery system improvements that would have, if OIF had not occurred, dramatically breached UN restrictions placed on Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War.

Detainees and co-operative sources indicate that beginning in 2000 Saddam ordered the development of ballistic missiles with ranges of at least 400km and up to 1000km and that measures to conceal these projects from UNMOVIC were initiated in late-2002, ahead of the arrival of inspectors. Work was also underway for a clustered engine liquid propellant missile, and it appears the work had progressed to a point to support initial prototype production of some parts and assemblies. According to a cooperating senior detainee, Saddam concluded that the proposals from both the liquid-propellant and solid-propellant missile design centers would take too long. For instance, the liquid-propellant missile project team forecast first delivery in six years. Saddam countered in 2000 that he wanted the missile designed and built inside of six months. On the other hand several sources contend that Saddam's range requirements for the missiles grew from 400-500km in 2000 to 600-1000km in 2002.

ISG has gathered testimony from missile designers at Al Kindi State Company that Iraq has reinitiated work on converting SA-2 Surface-to-Air Missiles into ballistic missiles with a range goal of about 250km. Engineering work was reportedly underway in early 2003, despite the presence of UNMOVIC. This program was not declared to the UN. ISG is presently seeking additional confirmation and details on this project. A second cooperative source has stated that the program actually began in 2001, but that it received added impetus in the run-up to OIF, and that missiles from this project were transferred to a facility north of Baghdad. This source also provided documentary evidence of instructions to convert SA-2s into surface-to-surface missiles.

ISG has obtained testimony from both detainees and cooperative sources that indicate that proscribed-range solid-propellant missile design studies were initiated, or already underway, at the time when work on the clustered liquid-propellant missile designs began.  The motor diameter was to be 800 to 1000mm, i.e. much greater than the 500-mm Ababil-100. The range goals cited for this system vary from over 400km up to 1000km, depending on the source and the payload mass.

A cooperative source, involved in the 2001-2002 deliberations on the long-range solid propellant project, provided ISG with a set of concept designs for a launcher designed to accommodate a 1m diameter by 9m length missile. The limited detail in the drawings suggest there was some way to go before launcher fabrication. The source believes that these drawings would not have been requested until the missile progress was relatively advanced, normally beyond the design state. The drawing are in CAD format, with files dated 09/01/02.

While we have obtained enough information to make us confident that this design effort was underway, we are not yet confident which accounts of the timeline and project progress are accurate and are now seeking to better understand this program and its actual progress at the time of OIF.

One cooperative source has said that he suspected that the new large-diameter solid-propellant missile was intended to have a CW-filled warhead, but no detainee has admitted any actual knowledge of plans for unconventional warheads for any current or planned ballistic missile. The suspicion expressed by the one source about a CW warhead was based on his assessment of the unavailability of nuclear warheads and potential survivability problems of biological warfare agent in ballistic missile warheads. This is an area of great interest and we are seeking additional information on warhead designs.

While I have spoken so far of planned missile systems, one high-level detainee has recently claimed that Iraq retained a small quantity of Scud-variant missiles until at least 2001, although he subsequently recanted these claims, work continues to determine the truth.  Two other sources contend that Iraq continued to produce until 2001 liquid fuel and oxidizer specific to Scud-type systems. The cooperating source claims that the al Tariq Factory was used to manufacture Scud oxidizer (IRFNA) from 1996 to 2001, and that nitrogen tetroxide, a chief ingredient of IRFNA was collected from a bleed port on the production equipment, was reserved, and then mixed with highly concentrated nitric acid plus an inhibitor to produce Scud oxidizer.  Iraq never declared its pre-Gulf War capability to manufacture Scud IRFNA out of fear, multiple sources have stated, that the al Tariq Factory would be destroyed, leaving Baghdad without the ability to produce highly concentrated nitric acid, explosives and munitions. To date we have not discovered documentary or material evidence to corroborate these claims, but continued efforts are underway to clarify and confirm this information with additional Iraqi sources and to locate corroborating physical evidence. If we can confirm that the fuel was produced as late as 2001, and given that Scud fuel can only be used in Scud-variant missiles, we will have strong evidence that the missiles must have been retained until that date. This would, of course, be yet another example of a failure to declare prohibited activities to the UN.

Iraq was continuing to develop a variety of UAV platforms and maintained two UAV programs that were working in parallel, one at Ibn Fernas and one at al-Rashid Air Force Base. Ibn Fernas worked on the development of smaller, more traditional types of UAVs in addition to the conversion of manned aircraft into UAVs. This program was not declared to the UN until the 2002 CAFCD in which Iraq declared the RPV-20, RPV-30 and Pigeon RPV systems to the UN. All these systems had declared ranges of less than 150km. Several Iraqi officials stated that the RPV-20 flew over 500km on autopilot in 2002, contradicting Iraq's declaration on the system's range. The al-Rashid group was developing a competing line of UAVs. This program was never fully declared to the UN and is the subject of on-going work by ISG. Additional work is also focusing on the payloads and intended use for these UAVs. Surveillance and use as decoys are uses mentioned by some of those interviewed. Given Iraq's interest before the Gulf War in attempting to convert a MIG-21 into an unmanned aerial vehicle to carry spray tanks capable of dispensing chemical or biological agents, attention is being paid to whether any of the newer generation of UAVs were intended to have a similar purpose. This remains an open question.

ISG has discovered evidence of two primary cruise missile programs. The first appears to have been successfully implemented, whereas the second had not yet reached maturity at the time of OIF.

The first involved upgrades to the HY-2 coastal-defense cruise missile. ISG has developed multiple sources of testimony, which is corroborated in part by a captured document, that Iraq undertook a program aimed at increasing the HY-2's range and permitting its use as a land-attack missile. These efforts extended the HY-2's range from its original 100km to 150-180km. Ten modified missiles were delivered to the military prior to OIF and two of these were fired from Umm Qasr during OIF - one was shot down and one hit Kuwait.

The second program, called the Jenin, was a much more ambitious effort to convert the HY-2 into a 1000km range land-attack cruise missile. The Jenin concept was presented to Saddam on 23 November 2001 and received what cooperative sources called an "unusually quick response" in little more than a week. The essence of the concept was to take an HY-2, strip it of its liquid rocket engine, and put in its place a turbine engine from a Russian helicopter - the TV-2-117 or TV3-117 from a Mi-8 or Mi-17helicopter. To prevent discovery by the UN, Iraq halted engine development and testing and disassembled the test stand in late 2002 before the design criteria had been met.

In addition to the activities detailed here on Iraq's attempts to develop delivery systems beyond the permitted UN 150km, ISG has also developed information on Iraqi attempts to purchase proscribed missiles and missile technology. Documents found by ISG describe a high level dialogue between Iraq and North Korea that began in December 1999 and included an October 2000 meeting in Baghdad. These documents indicate Iraqi interest in the transfer of technology for surface-to-surface missiles with a range of 1300km (probably No Dong) and land-to-sea missiles with a range of 300km. The document quotes the North Koreans as understanding the limitations imposed by the UN, but being prepared "to cooperate with Iraq on the items it specified". At the time of OIF, these discussions had not led to any missiles being transferred to Iraq. A high level cooperating source has reported that in late 2002 at Saddam's behest a delegation of Iraqi officials was sent to meet with foreign export companies, including one that dealt with missiles. Iraq was interested in buying an advanced ballistic missile with 270km and 500km ranges.

The ISG has also identified a large volume of material and testimony by cooperating Iraq officials on Iraq's effort to illicitly procure parts and foreign assistance for its missile program. These include:

  • Significant level of assistance from a foreign company and its network of affiliates in supplying and supporting the development of production capabilities for solid rocket propellant and dual-use chemicals.

  • Entities from another foreign country were involved in supplying guidance and control systems for use in the Al-Fat'h (Ababil-100). The contract was incomplete by the time of OIF due to technical problems with the few systems delivered and a financial dispute.

  • A group of foreign experts operating in a private capacity were helping to develop Iraq's liquid propellant ballistic missile RDT&E and production infrastructure. They worked in Baghdad for about three months in late 1998 and subsequently continued work on the project from abroad. An actual contract valued at $10 million for machinery and equipment was signed in June 2001, initially for 18 months, but later extended. This cooperation continued right up until the war.

  • A different group of foreign experts traveled to Iraq in 1999 to conduct a technical review that resulted in what became the Al Samoud 2 design, and a contract was signed in 2001 for the provision of rigs, fixtures and control equipment for the redesigned missile.

  • Detainees and cooperative sources have described the role of a foreign expert in negotiations on the development of Iraq's liquid and solid propellant production infrastructure. This could have had applications in existing and planned longer range systems, although it is reported that nothing had actually been implemented before OIF.

Uncertainty remains about the full extent of foreign assistance to Iraq's planned expansion of its missile systems and work is continuing to gain a full resolution of this issue. However, there is little doubt from the evidence already gathered that there was  substantial illegal procurement for all aspects of the missile programs.

I have covered a lot of ground today, much of it highly technical. Although we are resisting drawing conclusions in this first interim report, a number of things have become clearer already as a result of our investigation, among them:

  1. Saddam, at least as judged by those scientists and other insiders who worked in his military-industrial programs, had not given up his aspirations and intentions to continue to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Even those senior officials we have interviewed who claim no direct knowledge of any on-going prohibited activities readily acknowledge that Saddam intended to resume these programs whenever the external restrictions were removed. Several of these officials acknowledge receiving inquiries since 2000 from Saddam or his sons about how long it would take to either restart CW production or make available chemical weapons.

  2. In the delivery systems area there were already well advanced, but undeclared, on-going activities that, if OIF had not intervened, would have resulted in the production of missiles with ranges at least up to 1000 km, well in excess of the UN permitted range of 150 km. These missile activities were supported by a serious clandestine procurement program about which we have much still to learn.

  3. In the chemical and biological weapons area we have confidence that there were at a minimum clandestine on-going research and development activities that were embedded in the Iraqi Intelligence Service. While we have much yet to learn about the exact work programs and capabilities of these activities, it is already apparent that these undeclared activities would have at a minimum facilitated chemical and biological weapons activities and provided a technically trained cadre.

Let me conclude by returning to something I began with today. We face a unique but challenging opportunity in our efforts to unravel the exact status of Iraq's WMD program. The good news is that we do not have to rely for the first time in over a decade on

  • the incomplete, and often false, data that Iraq supplied the UN/IAEA;

  • data collected by UN inspectors operating with the severe constraints that Iraqi security and deception actions imposed;

  • information supplied by defectors, some of whom certainly fabricated much that they supplied and perhaps were under the direct control of the IIS;

  • data collected by national technical collections systems with their own limitations.

The bad news is that we have to do this under conditions that ensure that our work will take time and impose serious physical dangers on those who are asked to carry it out.

Why should we take the time and run the risk to ensure that our conclusions reflect the truth to the maximum extent that is possible given the conditions in post-conflict Iraq? For those of us that are carrying out this search, there are two reasons that drive us to want to complete this effort.

First, whatever we find will probably differ from pre-war intelligence. Empirical reality on the ground is, and has always been, different from intelligence judgments that must be made under serious constraints of time, distance and information. It is, however, only by understanding precisely what those difference are that the quality of future intelligence and investment decisions concerning future intelligence systems can be improved. Proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is such a continuing threat to global society that learning those lessons has a high imperative.

Second, we have found people, technical information and illicit procurement networks that if allowed to flow to other countries and regions could accelerate global proliferation. Even in the area of actual weapons there is no doubt that Iraq had at one time chemical and biological weapons. Even if there were only a remote possibility that these pre-1991 weapons still exist, we have an obligation to American troops who are now there and the Iraqi population to ensure that none of these remain to be used against them in the ongoing insurgency activity.

Mr. Chairman and Members I appreciate this opportunity to share with you the initial results of the first 3 months of the activities of the Iraqi Survey Group. I am certain that I speak for Major General Keith Dayton, who commands the Iraqi Survey Group, when I say how proud we are of the men and women from across the Government and from our Coalition partners, Australia and the United Kingdom, who have gone to Iraq and are carrying out this important mission.

Thank you.


- mark 4-04-2004 3:34 pm [link]

What Happens When You Remain Silent?
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity -- August 22, 2003

August 22, 2003

MEMORANDUM FOR: Colleagues in Intelligence

FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

SUBJECT: Now It’s Your Turn

Sixty-four summers ago, when Hitler fabricated Polish provocations in his attempt to justify Germany’s invasion of Poland, there was not a peep out of senior German officials. Happily, in today’s Germany the imperative of truth telling no longer takes a back seat to ingrained docility and knee-jerk deference to the perceived dictates of “homeland security.” The most telling recent sign of this comes in today’s edition of Die Zeit, Germany’s highly respected weekly. The story, by Jochen Bittner holds lessons for us all.

Die Zeit’s report leaves in tatters the “evidence” cited by Secretary of State Colin Powell and other administration spokesmen as the strongest proof that Iraq was using mobile trailers as laboratories to produce material for biological weapons.
German Intelligence on Powell’s “Solid” Sources

Bittner notes that, like their American counterparts, German intelligence officials had to hold their noses as Powell on February 5 at the UN played fast and loose with intelligence he insisted came from “solid sources.” Powell’s specific claims concerning the mobile laboratories, it turns out, depended heavily—perhaps entirely—on a source of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s equivalent to the CIA. But the BND, it turns out, considered the source in no way “solid.” A “senior German security official” told Die Zeit that, in passing the report to US officials, the Germans made a point of noting “various problems with the source.” In more diplomatic language, Die Zeit’s informant indicated that the BND’s “evaluation of the source was not altogether positive.”

German officials remain in some confusion regarding the “four different sources” cited by Powell in presenting his case regarding the “biological laboratories.” Berlin has not been told who the other three sources are. In this context, a German intelligence officer mentioned that there is always the danger of false confirmation, suggesting it is possible that the various reports can be traced back to the same original source, theirs—that is, the one with which the Germans had “various problems.”

Even if there are in fact multiple sources, the Germans wonder what reason there is to believe that the others are more “solid” than their own. Powell indicated that some of the sources he cited were Iraqi émigrés. While the BND would not give Die Zeit an official comment, Bittner notes pointedly that German intelligence “proceeds on the assumption that émigrés do not always tell the truth and that the picture they draw can be colored by political motives.”

Plausible?

Despite all that, in an apparent bid to avoid taking the heat for appearing the constant naysayer on an issue of such neuralgic import in Washington, German intelligence officials say that, the dubious sourcing notwithstanding, they considered the information on the mobile biological laboratories “plausible.”

In recent weeks, any “plausibility” has all but evaporated. Many biological warfare specialists in the US and elsewhere were skeptical from the start. Now Defense Intelligence Agency specialists have joined their counterparts at the State Department and elsewhere in concluding that the two trailer/laboratories discovered in Iraq in early May are hydrogen-producing facilities for weather balloons to calibrate Iraqi artillery, as the Iraqis have said.

Perhaps it was this DIA report that emboldened the BND official to go public about the misgivings the BND had about the source.

Insult to Intelligence

What do intelligence analysts do when their professional ethic—to tell the truth without fear or favor—is prostituted for political expedience? Usually, they hold their peace, as we’ve already noted was the case in Germany in 1939 before the invasion of Poland. The good news is that some intelligence officials are now able to recognize a higher duty—particularly when the issue involves war and peace. Clearly, some BND officials are fed up with the abuse of intelligence they have witnessed—and especially the trifling with the intelligence that they have shared with the US from their own sources. At least one such official appears to have seen it as a patriotic duty to expose what appears to be a deliberate distortion.

This is a hopeful sign. There are indications that British intelligence officials, too, are beginning to see more distinctly their obligation to speak truth to power, especially in light of the treatment their government accorded Ministry of Defense biologist Dr. David Kelly, who became despondent to the point of suicide.

Even more commendable was the courageous move by senior Australian intelligence analyst Andrew Wilkie when it became clear to him that the government he was serving had decided to take part in launching an unprovoked war based on “intelligence” information he knew to be specious. Wilkie resigned and promptly spoke his piece—not only to his fellow citizens but, after the war, at Parliament in London and Congress in Washington. Andrew Wilkie was not naïve enough to believe he could stop the war when he resigned in early March. What was clear to him, however, was that he had a moral duty to expose the deliberate deception in which his government, in cooperation with the US and UK, had become engaged. And he knew instinctively that, in so doing, he could with much clearer conscience look at himself in the mirror each morning.

What About Us?

Do you not find it ironic that State Department foreign service officers, whom we intelligence professionals have (quite unfairly) tended to write off as highly articulate but unthinking apologists for whatever administration happens to be in power, are the only ones so far to resign on principle over the war on Iraq? Three of them have—all three with very moving explanations that their consciences would no longer allow them to promote “intelligence” and policies tinged with deceit.

What about you? It is clear that you have been battered, buffeted, besmirched. And you are painfully aware that you can expect no help at this point from Director George Tenet. Recall the painful morning when you watched him at the UN sitting squarely behind Powell, as if to say the Intelligence Community endorses the deceitful tapestry he wove. No need to remind you that his speech boasted not only the bogus biological trailers but also assertions of a “sinister nexus” between Iraq and al-Qaeda, despite the fact that your intense, year-and-a-half analytical effort had turned up no credible evidence to support that claim. To make matters worse, Tenet is himself under fire for acquiescing in a key National Intelligence Estimate on “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq that included several paragraphs based on a known forgery. That is the same estimate from which the infamous 16 words were drawn for the president’s state-of-the-union address on January 28.

And not only that. In a dramatic departure from customary practice, Tenet has let the moneychangers into the temple—welcoming the most senior policymakers into the inner sanctum where all-source analysis is performed at CIA headquarters, wining and dining Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Assistant Condoleezza Rice, and even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (now representing the Pentagon) on their various visits to make sure you didn’t miss anything! You have every right to expect to be protected from that kind of indignity. Small wonder that Gingrich, in a recent unguarded moment on TV, conceded that Tenet “is so grateful to President Bush that he will do anything for him.” CIA directors have no business being so integral a “part of the team.”

Powell, who points proudly to his four day-and-night cram course at the CIA in the days immediately prior to his February 5 UN speech, seems oblivious to the fact that personal visitations of that frequency and duration—and for that purpose—are unprecedented in the history of the CIA. Equally unprecedented are Cheney’s “multiple visits.” When George H. W. Bush was vice president, not once did he go out to CIA headquarters for a working visit. We brought our analysis to him. As you are well aware, once the subjects uppermost in policymakers’ minds are clear to analysts, the analysis itself must be conducted in an unfettered, sequestered way—and certainly without the direct involvement of officials with policy axes to grind. Until now, that is the way it has been done; the analysis and estimates were brought downtown to the policymakers—not the other way around.

What Happens When You Remain Silent?

There is no more telling example than Vietnam. CIA analysts were prohibited from reporting accurately on the non-incident in the Tonkin Gulf on August 4, 1964 until the White House had time to use the “furious fire-fight” to win the Tonkin Gulf resolution from Congress—and eleven more years of war for the rest of us.

And we kept quiet.

In November 1967 as the war gathered steam, CIA management gave President Lyndon Johnson a very important National Intelligence Estimate known to be fraudulent. Painstaking research by a CIA analyst, the late Sam Adams, had revealed that the Vietnamese Communists under arms numbered 500,000. But Gen. William Westmoreland in Saigon, eager to project an image of progress in the US “war of attrition,” had imposed a very low artificial ceiling on estimates of enemy strength.

Analysts were aghast when management caved in and signed an NIE enshrining Westmoreland’s count of between 188,000 and 208,000. The Tet offensive just two months later exploded that myth—at great human cost. And the war dragged on for seven more years.

Then, as now, morale among analysts plummeted. A senior CIA official made the mistake of jocularly asking Adams if he thought the Agency had “gone beyond the bounds of reasonable dishonesty.” Sam, who had not only a keen sense of integrity but first-hand experience of what our troops were experiencing in the jungles of Vietnam, had to be restrained. He would be equally outraged at the casualties being taken now by US forces fighting another unnecessary war, this time in the desert. Kipling’s verse applies equally well to jungle or desert:

If they question why we died, tell them because our fathers lied.

Adams himself became, in a very real sense, a casualty of Vietnam. He died of a heart attack at 55, with remorse he was unable to shake. You see, he decided to “go through channels,” pursuing redress by seeking help from imbedded CIA and the Defense Department Inspectors General. Thus, he allowed himself to be diddled for so many years that by the time he went public the war was mostly over—and the damage done.

Sam had lived painfully with the thought that, had he gone public when the CIA’s leaders caved in to the military in 1967, the entire left half of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial would not have had to be built. There would have been 25-30,000 fewer names for the granite to accommodate.

So too with Daniel Ellsberg, who made the courageous decision to give the Pentagon Papers on Vietnam to the New York Times and Washington Post for publication in 1971. Dan has been asked whether he has any regrets. Yes, one big one, he says. If he had made the papers available in 1964 or 65, this tragically unnecessary war might have been stopped in its tracks. Why did he not? Dan’s response is quite telling; he says the thought never occurred to him at the time.

Let the thought occur to you, now.

But Isn’t It Too Late?

No. While it is too late to prevent the misadventure in Iraq, the war is hardly over, and analogous “evidence” is being assembled against Iran, Syria, and North Korea. Yes, US forces will have their hands full for a long time in Iraq, but this hardly rules out further adventures based on “intelligence” as spurious as that used to argue the case for attacking Iraq.

The best deterrent is the truth. Telling the truth about the abuse of intelligence on Iraq could conceivably give pause to those about to do a reprise. It is, in any case, essential that the American people acquire a more accurate understanding of the use and abuse of intelligence. Only then can there be any hope that they can experience enough healing from the trauma of 9/11 to be able to make informed judgments regarding the policies pursued by this administration—thus far with the timid acquiescence of their elected representatives.

History is littered with the guilty consciences of those who chose to remain silent. It is time to speak out.

/s/

Gene Betit, Arlington, VA
Pat Lang, Alexandria, VA
David MacMichael, Linden, VA
Ray McGovern, Arlington, VA

Steering Group
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

- mark 4-05-2004 4:51 am [link]

New Doubts On Iraq Nuke Claims
CBSnews.com -- August 11, 2003

(CBS/AP) The Bush administration continued to make claims concerning Iraq's alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons even as the evidence behind those charges grew thinner, a newspaper [The Washington Post] reports.

- mark 3-07-2004 6:48 am [link]

Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence
Washington Post via Truthout -- Sunday, August 10, 2003

Page A01
By Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus
His name was Joe, from the U.S. government. He carried 40 classified slides and a message from the Bush administration.

An engineer-turned-CIA analyst, Joe had helped build the U.S. government case that Iraq posed a nuclear threat. He landed in Vienna on Jan. 22 and drove to the U.S. diplomatic mission downtown. In a conference room 32 floors above the Danube River, he told United Nations nuclear inspectors they were making a serious mistake.

At issue was Iraq's efforts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes. The U.S. government said those tubes were for centrifuges to enrich uranium for a nuclear bomb. But the IAEA, the world's nuclear watchdog, had uncovered strong evidence that Iraq was using them for conventional rockets.

- mark 3-07-2004 6:51 am [link]

[Seen at Where-Are-They(tm)]

Iraqi Trailers Said to Make Hydrogen, Not Biological Arms
New York Times -- August 8, 2003

By DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON — Engineering experts from the Defense Intelligence Agency have come to believe that the most likely use for two mysterious trailers found in Iraq was to produce hydrogen for weather balloons rather than to make biological weapons, government officials say.

The classified findings by a majority of the engineering experts differ from the view put forward in a white paper made public on May 28 by the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency, which said that the trailers were for making biological weapons.
Article reprinted by San Jose Mercury News.

- mark 3-07-2004 6:54 am [link]

[Article discusses public disclosures from classified October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) related to Nigerian yellowcake.]

White House reveals report to bolster uranium claim
CNN -- July 19, 2003

[The date on the CNN website indicates December 25, 2003. But this story broke on July 19, 2003. The URL on this story implies 2003/07/19, so I'm going with the July date.]

- mark 2-10-2004 7:15 am [link]

Key Judgments from October 2002 NIE
Declassified July 18, 2003


- mark 2-10-2004 8:17 am [link]

[Transcript of a briefing by a "sr. adminstration official" on the public release of portions of classified version of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE).]

Background Briefing on Iraq WMD
The White House -- July 18, 2003


- mark 2-10-2004 7:31 am [link]

New Evidence Could Sway Opinion on Iraq, Analysts Say
CNSNews -- July 17, 2003

By Lawrence Morahan
Amid mounting pressure on the Bush administration to explain questionable intelligence it used to justify war with Iraq, a U.N. arms inspector claims he is confident that within six months, he'll have "a substantial body of evidence" proving that Saddam Hussein did have a weapons of mass destruction program.

"I've already seen enough to convince me," U.N. arms inspector David Kay told NBC News anchorman Tom Brokaw on Tuesday's Nightly News broadcast.

- mark 4-04-2004 3:25 pm [link] [1 ref]

Remarks by the President and United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan in Photo Opportunity The Oval Office
The White House -- July 14, 2003

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, Dana, one last question.

Q Mr. President, back on the question of Iraq, and that specific line that has been in question --

THE PRESIDENT: Can you cite the line? (Laughter.)

Q I could, if you gave me some time.

THE PRESIDENT: When I gave the speech, the line was relevant.

Q So even though there has been some question about the intelligence -- the intelligence community knowing beforehand that perhaps it wasn't, you still believe that when you gave it --

THE PRESIDENT: Well, the speech that I gave was cleared by the CIA. And, look, the thing that's important to realize is that we're constantly gathering data. Subsequent to the speech, the CIA had some doubts. But when I gave the -- when they talked about the speech and when they looked at the speech, it was cleared. Otherwise, I wouldn't have put it in the speech. I'm not interested in talking about intelligence unless it's cleared by the CIA. And as Director Tenet said, it was cleared by the CIA.

The larger point is, and the fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power, along with other nations, so as to make sure he was not a threat to the United States and our friends and allies in the region. I firmly believe the decisions we made will make America more secure and the world more peaceful.

Thank you.

- mark 2-10-2004 6:33 am [link]

WMD report: conclusions
Conclusions and recommendations of the foreign affairs select committee in their report into the government's use of intelligence ahead of the war in Iraq

The Guardian -- July 7, 2003


- mark 3-07-2004 6:44 am [link]

[An extensive roundup of media errors before and after the invasion.]

The Great WMD Hunt
The media knew they were there--but where are they?

FAIR -- July/August 2003

By Seth Ackerman

By the time the war against Iraq began, much of the media had been conditioned to believe, almost as an article of faith, that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was bulging with chemical and biological weapons, despite years of United Nations inspections. Reporters dispensed with the formality of applying modifiers like "alleged" or "suspected" to Iraq's supposed unconventional weapon stocks. Instead, they asked "what precise threat Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction pose to America" (NBC Nightly News, 1/27/03). They wrote matter-of-factly of Washington's plans for a confrontation "over Iraq's banned weapons programs" (Washington Post, 1/27/03). And they referred to debates over whether Saddam Hussein was "making a good-faith effort to disarm Iraq's weapons of mass destruction" (Time, 2/3/03).
All of this came despite repeated reminders from the chief U.N. weapons inspector that it was his job to determine if Iraq was hiding weapons, and that it should not simply be assumed that Iraq was doing so.

So with much of southern Iraq in the hands of coalition forces by the weekend after the opening of hostilities, reporters naturally started asking where the weapons were: "Bush administration officials were peppered yesterday with questions about why allied forces in Iraq have not found any of the chemical or biological weapons that were President Bush's central justification for forcibly disarming Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's government," the Washington Post reported (3/23/03).

Miraculously, the answer seemed to come that Sunday night (3/23/03), when military officials told the media of a "chemical facility" found in the southern town of Najaf. "Bob, as you know, there's a lot of talk right now about a chemical cache that has been found at a chemical facility," MSNBC anchor Forrest Sawyer told White House correspondent Bob Kur. "I underscore, we do not know what the chemicals are, but it sure has gotten spread around fast."

It sure had. Over on Fox News Channel (3/23/03), the headline banners were already rolling: "HUGE CHEMICAL WEAPONS FACTORY FOUND IN SO IRAQ.... REPORTS: 30 IRAQIS SURRENDER AT CHEM WEAPONS PLANT.... COAL TROOPS HOLDING IRAQI IN CHARGE OF CHEM WEAPONS." The Jerusalem Post, whose embedded reporter helped break the story along with a Fox correspondent, announced in a front-page headline (3/24/03), "U.S. Troops Capture First Chemical Plant."

The next day (10/24/03), a Fox correspondent in Qatar quietly issued an update to the

story: The "chemical weapons facility discovered by coalition forces did not appear to be an active chemical weapons facility." Further testing was required. In fact, U.S. officials had admitted that morning that the site contained no chemicals at all and had been abandoned long ago (Dow Jones wire, 3/24/03).

"First solid confirmed existence"

So went the weapons hunt. On numerous occasions, the discovery of a stash of illegal Iraqi arms was loudly announced--often accompanied by an orgy of triumphalist off-the-cuff punditry--only to be deflated inconspicuously, and in a lower tone of voice, until the next false alarm was sounded. In one episode, embedded NPR reporter John Burnett (4/7/03) recounted the big news he'd learned from a "top military official": "the first solid confirmed existence of chemical weapons by the Iraqi army." According to Burnett, an army unit near Baghdad had discovered "20 BM-21 medium-range rockets with warheads containing sarin nerve gas and mustard gas."

When NPR Morning Edition anchor Susan Stamberg asked Burnett, "So this is really a major discovery, isn't it?" he assented: "If it turns out to be true, the commander told us this morning this would be a smoking gun. This would vindicate the administration's claims that the Iraqis had chemicals all along." Of course, it turned out not to be true. A Pentagon official, Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, told reporters the next day (4/8/03) that he had "seen nothing in official reports that would corroborate that."

On April 26, ABC World News Tonight blared an "exclusive" report: "U.S. troops discover chemical agents, missiles and what could be a mobile laboratory in Iraq." Correspondent David Wright explained that the Army soldiers had found "14 55-gallon drums, at least a dozen missiles and 150 gas masks" testing positive for chemical weapons, including a nerve agent and a blistering agent. He added that an Army lieutenant "says the tests have an accuracy of 98 percent."

Perhaps somewhat self-consciously, ABC followed Wright's report with a short segment about previous weapons claims that turned out to be false alarms. But the network continued to pump the story the next day, with anchor Carole Simpson introducing it as the lead segment on World News Sunday (4/27/03): "For the second day in a row, some of the preliminary tests have come back positive for chemical agents."

But when the U.S. Mobile Exploration Team (MET Bravo) arrived on the scene to conduct its own tests, it "tentatively concluded that there are no chemical weapons at a site where American troops said they had found chemical agents and mobile labs," the New York Times reported the next day (4/28/03). A member of the team told the Times simply: "The earlier reports were wrong."

True believers

Some of the more gung-ho media weren't discouraged at all by the constant false alarms. According to Rush Limbaugh's website (4/7/03), "We're discovering WMDs all over Iraq.... You know it killed NPR to report that the 101st Airborne found a stockpile of up to 20 rockets tipped with sarin and mustard gas.... Our troops have found dozens of barrels of chemicals in an agricultural facility 30 miles northwest of Baghdad."

"The discovery of these weapons of mass destruction doesn't surprise me," Limbaugh explained on his radio show (4/7/03). "The only part of it that surprises me is that we discovered them in Iraq." If U.S. forces were to look in Syria, he proposed, they would probably find an additional "huge cache" of smuggled weaponry.

On April 11, a Fox News report, still posted to the network's website as late as July, announced: "Weapons-Grade Plutonium Possibly Found at Iraqi Nuke Complex." Sourced to an embedded reporter from the right-wing Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the story was soon debunked by U.S. officials (AP, 4/15/03).

Fox didn't mention that the "massive" underground facility "discovered" beneath a military compound had actually been subject to continuous on-site U.N. monitoring for years. Instead, the network featured a soundbite from "former Iraqi scientist" George Gazi, who declared: "I think this demonstrates the failure of the U.N. weapons inspections and demonstrates that our guys are going to find the weapons of mass destruction."

But by the beginning of May, the administration gave up the ghost--apparently deciding that the day-by-day coverage of the weapons search, a slow drip of constant negative findings, was eroding the credibility of their prewar claims. In a series of interviews and off-the-record conversations, officials tried to talk down expectations, letting it be known that they now predicted no weapons would be found at all: An anonymous leak from a "senior Bush administration official" yielded a front-page article in the Financial Times (5/2/03): "The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he would be 'amazed if we found weapons-grade plutonium or uranium' and it was unlikely large volumes of biological or chemical material would be discovered." Condoleezza Rice speculated that Iraq's weapons programs might only exist "in bits and pieces" (Sydney Morning Herald, 5/1/03).

So how had the media come to be so convinced of the weapons' existence? And could they have seen past the White House spin had they chosen to?

"Parroting the so-called experts"

In part, journalists absorbed their aura of certainty from a battery of "independent" weapons experts who repeated the mantra of Iraq concealment over and over. Journalists used these experts as outside sources who could independently evaluate the administration's claims. Yet often these "experts" were simply repeating what they heard from U.S. officials, forming an endless loop of self-reinforcing scare mongering.

Take the ubiquitous David Albright, a former U.N. inspector in Iraq. Over the years, Albright had been cited in hundreds of news articles and made scores of television appearances as an authority on Iraqi weapons. A sample prewar quote from Albright (CNN, 10/5/02): "In terms of the chemical and biological weapons, Iraq has those now. How many, how could they deliver them? I mean, these are the big questions."

But when the postwar weapons hunt started turning up empty, Albright made a rather candid admission (L.A. Times, 4/20/03): "If there are no weapons of mass destruction, I'll be mad as hell. I certainly accepted the administration claims on chemical and biological weapons. I figured they were telling the truth. If there is no [unconventional weapons program], I will feel taken, because they asserted these things with such assurance." (Recently, Albright has become a prominent critic of the government's handling of prewar intelligence on Iraq.)

A similar case was Kenneth Pollack, the influential and heavily cited war advocate at the Brookings Institution. Before the war, Pollack had absolutely no doubt Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons. "Does he have the ability to attack us here in the United States?" Oprah Winfrey asked him on her talkshow (10/9/02). "He certainly does," Pollack explained. "He has biological and chemical agents that he could employ, but he'd have to use terrorist means to do so, which he's done in the past.... Right now, his capabilities to do so are fairly limited. The problem is that we know that he is building new capabilities as fast as he can."

As Pollack is a former CIA analyst who specialized in Persian Gulf military issues, many reporters no doubt took these as first-hand assessments. Yet in a post-war interview, when asked to defend his claims about Iraq's arsenal, Pollack demurred (NPR Weekend All Things Considered, 5/24/03): "That was the consensus of opinion among the intelligence community. It was hearing things like that that brought me to the conclusion that, you know, 'Boy, if this is the case, we've got to do something about this guy.' That was not me making that claim; that was me parroting the claims of so-called experts."

Some "experts" had a political axe to grind. Charles Duelfer, another former inspector, had been a State Department functionary for years before joining the UNSCOM inspection team. At the U.N. Security Council, critics of U.S. policy viewed him with suspicion as a Trojan horse. Once his U.N. tour of duty was over, he became a "resident scholar" at the conservative Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, appearing on TV news shows as an impartial authority. He answered technical questions on subjects like liquid bulk anthrax and aerial satellite photos, offering his considered judgment that Iraq unquestionably was hiding a huge arsenal.

But off-camera, Duelfer admitted he was a committed proponent of regime change whether Saddam was harboring illegal weapons or not (Endgame, Scott Ritter): "I think it would be a mistake to focus on the issue of weapons of mass destruction. To do so ignores the larger issue of whether or not we want this dictator to have control over a nation capable of producing 6 billion barrels of oil per day.... If you focus on the weapons issue, the first thing you know, Iraq will be given a clean bill of health."

"Inactionable intelligence"

The U.S. and British governments were proactive in managing the media on the weapons issue. Beginning in the fall of 1997, the British intelligence agency MI6 ran a disinformation campaign to promote the idea that Iraq was still hiding banned arms, according to sources cited by Seymour Hersh (New Yorker, 3/31/03). MI6 secretly arranged for an unidentified UNSCOM official sympathetic to Anglo-American policy to funnel false or unverifiable information--so-called "inactionable intelligence"--to the spy agency, which then planted the stories in newspapers in Britain and abroad.

"It was intelligence that was crap, and that we couldn't move on, but the Brits wanted to plant stories," a former U.S. intelligence official told Hersh. An unnamed former Clinton administration official said the U.S. approved the operation: "I knew that was going on," he told Hersh. "We were getting ready for action in Iraq, and we wanted the Brits to prepare."

Within the press, perhaps the most energetic disseminator of "inactionable intelligence" on Iraq's putative weapons has been the New York Times' Judith Miller. A veteran of the Iraqi WMD beat, Miller has accumulated a bulging clippings file over the years full of splashy, yet often maddeningly unverifiable, exposés alleging various Iraqi arms shenanigans: "Secret Arsenal: The Hunt for Germs of War" (2/26/98); "Defector Describes Iraq's Atom Bomb Push" (8/15/98); "Iraqi Tells of Renovations at Sites For Chemical and Nuclear Arms" (12/20/01); "Defectors Bolster U.S. Case Against Iraq, Officials Say" (1/24/03).

In May, an internal Times email written by Miller found its way to the Washington Post's media columnist (5/26/03). In the message, Miller casually revealed her source for many of these stories: Ahmed Chalabi, the former Iraqi exile leader (and convicted embezzler) who for over a decade had been lobbying Washington to support the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime: "I've been covering Chalabi for about 10 years," Miller wrote. "He has provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper." Chalabi, with his network of defectors and exiles, is known in Washington foreign-policy circles as a primary source for many of the weapons allegations that career CIA analysts greeted with skepticism, but that Pentagon hawks promoted eagerly (UPI, 3/12/03).

Miller's most noted contribution to the postwar media weapons hunt was a widely criticized article (4/21/03) about an Iraqi scientist in U.S. custody who led soldiers to a batch of buried chemicals that he claimed had been part of an illegal weapons program. (He also testified that materials had been smuggled into Syria and that the Iraqi government was liaising with Al Qaeda.) Despite having been written under a bizarre set of military-imposed ground rules--barring Miller from talking to the scientist, visiting his home or naming the chemicals in question, and establishing a three-day embargo on the article's publication--the Times chose to run the piece on the paper's front page.

"While this reporter could not interview the scientist," Miller reported, "she was permitted to see him from a distance." She confirmed that he was "clad in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap" as he "pointed to several spots in the sand where he said chemical precursors and other weapons material were buried." The story quickly fizzled out as senior Pentagon officials told reporters they were "highly skeptical" of the scientist's claims about Al Qaeda (AP, 4/22/03) and analysts pointed out that most chemical weapons precursors also have widespread civilian uses. In subsequent weeks, the administration has let the matter drop, and never made public the types of chemicals that had been found.

A question of accounting

In short, the longstanding "consensus" in official circles that Iraq must have been harboring illegal arms has always had somewhat murky origins. Behind the thundering allegations issued at heavily publicized official press conferences, a careful observer might have noticed quiet signs of dissent: the "senior intelligence analyst" who anonymously told the Washington Post four days before the war started (3/16/03) that one reason U.N. inspectors didn't find any weapons stockpiles "is because there may not be much of a stockpile." Or Rolf Ekeus, the former head of UNSCOM, who told a Harvard gathering three years ago (AP, 8/16/00) that "we felt that in all areas we have eliminated Iraq's [WMD] capabilities fundamentally." Or, for that matter, UNSCOM alum Scott Ritter, whose publicly aired doubts about the alleged weapons led a raft of scornful newspaper profiles to scoff that he must be some kind of crank (New York Times Magazine, 11/24/02; Washington Post, 10/21/02).

Ultimately, the claims and counterclaims about Iraq's weapons boiled down to a question of accounting. In the early 1990s, Iraq had handed over thousands of tons of chemical weapons to the U.N. inspectors for disposal. But it hid the existence of other pre-Gulf War weapons programs, such as VX and anthrax, and the inspectors only learned the full details of these programs after the 1995 defection of Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel, Iraq's weapons chief. By 1996, the U.N. teams had destroyed Iraq's last remaining dual-use production equipment and facilities, rendering the regime incapable of making new weapons. All that was left unaccounted for were old quantities of biological and chemical arms that Iraq produced in the late 1980's but could not prove it had eliminated.

The regime claimed these materials had been hurriedly destroyed in secret in the summer of 1991 as part of an ultimately failed effort to conceal how far their weapons programs had gotten. Using forensic techniques, the inspectors confirmed that Iraq indeed "undertook extensive, unilateral and secret destruction of large quantities of proscribed weapons" (UNSCOM report, 1/29/99), but they were never able to measure exactly how much had been destroyed--leaving open the possibility that some remained hidden. This was the famous "26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulin, one-and-a-half tons of nerve agent VX, [and] 6,500 aerial chemical bombs" that administration officials spent the prewar period crowing about (Ari Fleischer press conference, 3/3/03).

With remarkable unanimity, former Iraqi scientists interviewed since the war about the status of the weapons programs--including VX specialist Emad Ani, presidential science advisor Lt. Gen. Amer al-Saadi, nuclear scientist Jafar Jafar and chief U.N. liaison Brigadier-Gen. Ala Saeed--have all maintained that the regime did, in fact, destroy these stockpiles in the early 1990s, as it claimed. "According to a U.S. intelligence official, the top scientists are all 'sticking to the party line, that Saddam destroyed all his WMD long ago,'" the Los Angeles Times reported (4/27/03).

But journalists looking for clues should not have had to wait for the end of the war to find evidence of this. "In my view, there are no large quantities of weapons," former UNSCOM chief Rolf Ekeus told Arms Control Today in March 2000. "I don't think that Iraq is especially eager in the biological and chemical area to produce such weapons for storage. Iraq views those weapons as tactical assets instead of strategic assets, which would require long-term storage of those elements, which is difficult. Rather, Iraq has been aiming to keep the capability to start up production immediately should it need to."

Given that no serious evidence of ongoing Iraqi production capability ever turned up--especially after inspectors returned last year and were given unfettered, no-notice access to suspected sites--there were few grounds for assuming that Iraqi retained a significant WMD capability.

Another clue reporters missed: Weeks before the war began, the transcript of Hussein Kamel's 1995 private briefing to U.N. inspectors was leaked and posted to the Internet (Newsweek, 3/3/03). The interview revealed a crucial fact that the Clinton and Bush administrations, which both promoted the defector's story as evidence of an ongoing Iraqi WMD threat, had long neglected to mention: Kamel told the inspectors that all the weapons had been destroyed. Coming from the head of Iraq's secret weapons industries, a source the Pentagon, CIA and U.N. had all praised for his intelligence value, the revelation should have been front-page news. Instead, it was barely covered (Extra!, 5-6/03).

Centerpiece or hot air?

Having suffered a series of public humiliations from the conspicuous absence of unconventional weapons, the administration made it known that it was pinning its hopes on two trailers found in northern Iraq, which they termed mobile biological weapons labs. On May 12, NBC News correspondent Jim Avila, reporting from Baghdad, declared that the labs "may be the most significant WMD findings of the war." Joining him was hawkish former U.N. nuclear inspector David Kay (now an "NBC News analyst"), who was flown to Iraq to perform an impromptu inspection for the cameras. Armed with a pointer, he rattled off the trailer 's parts: "This is a compressor. You want to keep the fermentation process under pressure so it goes faster. This vessel is the fermenter...." In his report, Avila didn't explain how and why Kay and the NBC crew obtained access to the trailers while the legally mandated U.N. inspection team, UNMOVIC, had been barred from looking at them.

The trailers quickly became the "centerpiece" (New York Times, 5/21/03) of the administration's argument that Iraq was indeed hiding a biowarfare program, and Bush himself used them to proclaim (5/31/03) that "for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them." No actual biological agents were found on the trucks, though; nor were any ingredients for biological weapons. In fact, no direct evidence linked the trailers to biological production at all.

U.S. officials said the trailers' equipment was capable of making such agents. Even then, the unconcentrated slurry that resulted could not have been put into a weapon: "Other units that we have not yet found would be needed to prepare and sterilize the media and to concentrate and possibly dry the agent, before the agent is ready for introduction into a delivery system," the CIA's report admitted (5/28/03).

Iraqi scientists who worked at the institute where one of the trailers was found offered a different explanation: They told interrogators that the labs were used to produce hydrogen for military weather balloons. "Even while conceding that the equipment could, in fact, have been used occasionally to make hydrogen" (New York Times, 5/21/03), the CIA report dismissed that explanation, reasoning that such a production technique "would be inefficient." (Yet the weapon-making technique imputed to the trailers was also "inefficient," an intelligence official admitted--New York Times, 5/29/03.) In fact, a technical analysis alone, they said, "would not lead you intuitively and logically to biological warfare" (New York Times, 5/29/03).

On the other hand, the trailer's equipment "appeared to contain traces of aluminum, a metal that can be used to create hydrogen." Yet that was discounted by U.S. officials, who said the aluminum "might have been planted by Iraqis to create the illusion that the units had made gas for weather balloons" (New York Times, 5/21/03).

A few weeks later, a front-page New York Times article by Judith Miller and William Broad (6/7/03) quoted senior intelligence analysts who doubted the trailers were used for biological weapons. "I have no great confidence that it's a fermenter," one WMD specialist said of a key piece of equipment on the trailer. (In his TV performance on NBC, David Kay had evinced total confidence that it was.) The CIA report, he said, "was a rushed job and looks political."

Analysts noted that the trailers "lacked gear for steam sterilization, normally a prerequisite for any kind of biological production." "That's a huge minus," said a U.S. government biological expert who had been quoted in an earlier Judith Miller article endorsing the administration's theory. "I don't see how you can clean those tanks chemically." A senior administration official was quoted admitting that "some analysts give the hydrogen claim more credence."

It's worth noting that in the 1980s, the British defense contractor Marconi received a government-backed loan to sell the Iraqi army an Artillery Meteorological System, an artillery radar system that uses weather balloons to track wind patterns (London Guardian, 2/28/03).

- mark 4-04-2004 2:44 pm [link]

[Note: Most posts contain a single story. However, this mega post contains links to a large number of stories from late June 2003.]

Weapons inspector: «Powell bluffed the UN»
Nettavisen -- 26 June 2003
Ole Berthelsen / Hanne Dankertsen

Secretary of State Colin Powell was bluffing the UN when claiming that Iraq had a robust program of weapons of mass destruction, according to the Norwegian weapons inspector Jørn Siljeholm.
Agency Disputes C.I.A. View of Trailers as Iraqi Weapons Labs
The New York Times -- June 26, 2003
By DOUGLAS JEHL
seen at cursor
WASHINGTON — The State Department's intelligence division is disputing the Central Intelligence Agency's conclusion that mysterious trailers found in Iraq were for making biological weapons, United States government officials said today.

In a classified June 2 memorandum, the officials said, the department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research said it was premature to conclude that the trailers were evidence of an Iraqi biological weapons program, as President Bush has done. The disclosure of the memorandum is the clearest sign yet of disagreement between intelligence agencies over the assertion, which was produced jointly by the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency and made public on May 28 on the C.I.A. Web site. Officials said the C.I.A. and D.I.A. did not consult with other intelligence agencies before issuing the report.
US WMD probe could take 'months'
news.com.au -- June 23, 2003

Report Cast Doubt on Iraq-Al Qaeda Connection
The Washington Post -- June 22, 2003
By Walter Pincus




Click through for additional stories covering late June of 2003 ...

The Bush Doctrine At Risk
The Washington Post -- June 22, 2003
George F. Will

Blix Downgrades Prewar Assessment of Iraqi Weapons
The Washington Post -- June 22, 2003
Page A20 [Page A20!? Thanks for keeping this story front and center.]
By Colum Lynch
UNITED NATIONS -- As he nears the end of his three-year hunt for Iraq's biological and chemical weapons, Hans Blix, the United Nations' chief weapons inspector, says he suspects that Baghdad possessed little more than "debris" from a former, secret weapons program when the United States invaded the country in March.
Iraq weapons 'will be found'
BBC News -- June 22, 2003

Experts cast doubt on Iraq 'weapons trailer' claims
Australian Broadcast Company -- June 22, 2003

U.S. troops seize top secret Iraqi intelligence
AP via The Kansas City Star -- June 22, 2003

Bush administration credibility at stake on WMD question, says GOP Sen. Hagel
AP via Boston Globe -- June 22, 2003

WMD: Intelligence Without Brains
Cato Institute -- June 22, 2003

Bush Says Iraqi Weapons Sites Were Looted
Reuters -- June 21, 2003

The garbage intelligence that helped to unleash a war
Sydney Morning Herald -- June 21 2003

Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments:
Gen. says White House pushed Saddam link without evidence

Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting -- June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.

But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.

Here is a transcript of the exchange:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."

RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"

CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, 'You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.' I said, 'But--I'm willing to say it, but what's your evidence?' And I never got any evidence."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Clark's assertion corroborates a little-noted CBS Evening News story that aired on September 4, 2002. As correspondent David Martin reported: "Barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, the secretary of defense was telling his aides to start thinking about striking Iraq, even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks." According to CBS, a Pentagon aide's notes from that day quote Rumsfeld asking for the "best info fast" to "judge whether good enough to hit SH at the same time, not only UBL." (The initials SH and UBL stand for Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.) The notes then quote Rumsfeld as demanding, ominously, that the administration's response "go massive...sweep it all up, things related and not."

Despite its implications, Martin's report was greeted largely with silence when it aired. Now, nine months later, media are covering damaging revelations about the Bush administration's intelligence on Iraq, yet still seem strangely reluctant to pursue stories suggesting that the flawed intelligence-- and therefore the war-- may have been a result of deliberate deception, rather than incompetence. The public deserves a fuller accounting of this story.
Harman cites 'difficulty' of WMD search
Closed hearing for House intelligence panel

CNN -- June 20, 2003
WASHINGTON -- The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee says determining what happened to Iraq's alleged stockpile of weapons of mass destruction may be more difficult than previously thought.
Where Are WMDs? Where's Congress?
CBSNews.com -- June 20, 2003
seen at Bartcop E!

Talking Points Memo -- June 20, 2003

Weapons of mass deception?
Americans don’t seem to care whether Iraq had WMD or not
Slate via MSNBC -- June 19, 2003
Michael Kinsley

THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR
The First Casualty

The New Republic -- June 19, 2003
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
seen at Whiskey Bar
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
Ex-CIA director says administration stretched facts on Iraq
USA Today -- June 18, 2003
By John Diamond
seen at Tom Tomorrow's blog
WASHINGTON — Former CIA director Stansfield Turner accused the Bush administration Tuesday of "overstretching the facts" about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in making its case for invading that country.
Iraq intelligence inquiry 'driven by opportunism': Howard
Australian Broadcast Corporation AM -- June 18, 2003

Blair's troubles just begining
Daily KOS -- June 18, 2003
By Steve Gilliard
[Commentary, and links to three Guardian articles.]

. . . but Still Ruffling Feathers
Washington Post -- June 17, 2003
By Richard Cohen
[Under Secretary John Bolton making friends in Italy.]

Blair Accused of Deception in Iraq Weapons Threat
Reuters -- June 17, 2003

British Parliament Opens WMD Inquiry
Former Cabinet Ministers Say Intelligence Was Manipulated
AP via Washington Post -- June 17, 2003
By Jill Lawless
LONDON -- The British government made selective use of intelligence to justify going to war with Iraq, two former senior Cabinet ministers told lawmakers Tuesday, the first day of a parliamentary inquiry studying the issue.
Butler slams delay on Iraq probe
Herald Sun -- June 17, 2003
FORMER United Nations weapons inspector Richard Butler said today it was "just shocking" Australia was the last nation to consider an inquiry into intelligence information about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
MPs examine Iraq weapons evidence
Mr Cook's evidence is likely to pour fuel on the row over WMD MPs are to begin examining whether the government misled the public about the extent of the evidence it had against Saddam Hussein.

BBC News -- June 17, 2003

Levin seeks release of Iraq intelligence provided U.N. inspectors
Associated Press via San Francisco Chronicle -- June 16, 2003
KEN GUGGENHEIM
(06-16) 15:32 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Democratic senator urged the CIA on Monday to release information that he said would prove the United States withheld from U.N. inspectors key information on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction
Nonsmoking Smoking Guns
The Village Voice -- June 16, 2003

CIA TAKES CHARGE OF FRANTIC WMD SEARCH
New York Post -- June 16, 2003

PM faces WMD inquiry call
news.com.au -- June 17, 2003

Former Aide Takes Aim at War on Terror
Washington Post -- June 16, 2003
By Laura Blumenfeld

Howard's Iraq evidence on parade in UK
Sydney Morning Herald -- June 16, 2003
seen at the agonist

Iraq trailer a biological weapons lab, claims PM
AAP via Syndey Morning Herald -- June 16 2003
seen at the agonist
British and American intelligence reports had concluded that a trailer found in Iraq was a biological weapons facility, Prime Minister John Howard said today.
A mission in Iraq built on a lie
When Bush wondered what to do about September 11 an ultra-right
lobby group was there to tell him, writes Robert Manne.

Sydney Morning Herald -- June 16 2003

Ample Evidence of Abuses, Little of Illegal Weapons
Some claims made against Iraq before the war now appear overstated or false, but the White House is confident of vindication.

LA Times -- June 15, 2003
seen at Altercation

Iraqi mobile labs nothing to do with germ warfare, report finds
The Observer -- June 15, 2003
Peter Beaumont, Antony Barnett and Gaby Hinsliff
seen at this modern world
The revelation that the mobile labs were to produce hydrogen for artillery balloons will also cause discomfort for the British authorities because the Iraqi army's original system was sold to it by the British company, Marconi Command & Control.
Spook On The Spot
Can the CIA chief effectively lead the
search for weapons of mass destruction?

Time Magazine -- June 15
seen at Daily KOS
All this responsibility may or may not be what Tenet is seeking. On July 11 he will become the third longest-serving CIA director, and sources tell Time he had been mulling retirement before the weapons controversy. The new assignment offers him a chance to go out either as a hero--or a scapegoat. "The spin is that somebody's got to be in charge so that it's being done in an organized fashion," says an intelligence official. "The more cynical view is that they have handed the whole bag of s___ to him."
War poll uncovers fact gap
Many mistakenly believe U.S. found WMDs in Iraq.
Philidelphia Inquirer -- June 14, 2003

The Boys Who Cried Wolfowitz
New York Times -- June 14, 2003
By BILL KELLER
We're now up to Day 87 of the largely fruitless hunt for Iraq's unconventional weapons. Allegations keep piling up that the Bush administration tried to scam the world into war by exaggerating evidence of the Iraqi threat. One critic has pronounced it "arguably the worst scandal in American political history." So you might reasonably ask a supporter of the war, How do you feel about that war now?

Thanks for asking.
Fall Guy?
Newsweek via MSNBC -- June 14, 2003
Eleanor Clift
The White House is blaming George Tenet for faulty WMD intelligence. But forcing out the CIA director will not repair the damage to America’s credibility abroad
CIA reassigns two top Iraq analysts
The Hindu -- June 14, 2003

The Dog Ate My WMDs
truthout -- June 13, 2003
By William Rivers Pitt

Bush Defends Uranium Allegation Vs. Iraq
AP via Yahoo! News -- June 13, 2003
By JOHN J. LUMPKIN
WASHINGTON - The White House on Friday stood by President Bush's assertion that Iraq has sought uranium in Africa in recent years, saying that his allegation in January was supported by more evidence than a series of letters now known to have been forged.

[snip]

Officials did not specify the sources of any such additional intelligence. Intelligence officials have previously described other evidence of recent Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium in Africa as fragmentary.
White House in Denial
New York Times -- June 13, 2003
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

White House was warned of dubious intelligence, official says
Knight-Ridder Newspapers -- June 13, 2003

CIA Says It Cabled Key Data to White House
But Officials Say Document Lacked Conclusion on Iraqi Uranium Deal

Washington Post -- June 13, 2003

Blair ignored CIA warning over forged documents on Saddam's nuclear capability
Government still used intelligence months later to justify action against Iraq
AP via The Independent -- June 13, 2003

Captured Iraqis Providing WMD Information
AP via Fox News -- June 13, 2003
[Wow, that's an amazing headline! WMD at last. Lordy, oh lordy, WMD at last. Hmm, the story says something about "possible chemical and biological weapons sites". Whoa, Nelly, that's not WMD.

Google news search reveals the various headlines given to this AP story by different news organizations ...

Iraq Prisoners Give Possible Weapons Info
27 times

Captured Iraqis giving information about possible weapons
5 times

Captured Iraqis Providing WMD Information
just Fox

Fox News: We distort, you comply.]
Powell Defends Iraq WMD Intelligence
AP via Fox News -- June 13, 2003

If You Don't Believe Us, You Support Saddam
Missing Weapons, Shrinking Bush and the Media

Counterpunch -- June 13, 2003

Covert Unit Hunted for Iraqi Arms
Amid Raids and Rescue, Task Force 20 Failed To Pinpoint Weapons
Washington Post -- June 13, 2003

Secret US army unit scoured Iraq
for WMD's, but found nil: report

AFP via SpaceWar -- June 13, 2003

CIA rejects blame for Bush's Iraq uranium claim
Reuters via MSNBC -- June 12, 2003

Radioactive Mystery
How Did 'Bogus' Info about Iraq's Nuclear Plans Get Into Bush's Speech?

ABC News -- June 12, 2003

CIA Did Not Share Doubt on Iraq Data
Bush Used Report Of Uranium Bid

Washington Post -- June 12, 2003
By Walter Pincus
A key component of President Bush's claim in his State of the Union address last January that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program -- its alleged attempt to buy uranium in Niger -- was disputed by a CIA-directed mission to the central African nation in early 2002, according to senior administration officials and a former government official. But the CIA did not pass on the detailed results of its investigation to the White House or other government agencies, the officials said
Questions Continue on President's Use of Forged Nuclear Evidence
Rep. Henry Waxman -- June 12, 2003

The Case of the Missing WMDs
Fox News -- June 12, 2003
By Gene Healy, Cato Institute
Some war critics can barely contain their glee about the missing Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (search). But they may be setting themselves up for a fall. As the Bush administration constantly reminds us, Iraq is a big country, and the weapons may yet turn up. If they do, does that mean the administration is vindicated?

Hardly. The focus on missing weapons threatens to obscure the larger point: that with or without chemical and biological weapons, Iraq was never a national security threat to the United States.
Lies, Damned Lies And Military Intelligence
Military.com -- June 11, 2003
William S. Lind

Powell, Rice’s credibility at risk
Black presidential Cabinet members sent out to explain war
MSNBC -- June 11, 2003

Lingering Questions
Newsweek -- June 11, 2003
[Scroll down to "ANOTHER HYPED WMD REPORT?" for discussion of recent alarming report about Al Qaeda issued to the UN and a contradictory report issued to domestic law enforcement.]
Japan PM struggles to defend support for US with no Iraqi WMD found
AFP via SpaceWar -- June 11, 2003

Blix: I was smeared by the Pentagon
The Guardian -- June 11, 2003

One last warning from the man who made an enemy of Bush
UN weapons inspector says Iraqi guilt is still not proven
The Guardian -- June 11, 2003

Blix Defends U.N. Weapons Inspectors
Associated Press via The Guardian -- June 11, 2003

Blix again accuses US and UK
Duetsche Welle -- June 11, 2003

Report attacks Blair over Iraq intelligence
The Independent -- June 11, 2003
[I would have gone with: Blair Censured over Dodgy Dossier.]

What the definition of "WMD" is
Slate -- June 11, 2003
By Jake Tapper
When President George W. Bush says "cow," does he really mean "milk"? Does he use the terms "light bulb factory" and "light bulb" interchangeably? According to White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, when the president declared two weeks ago Friday that "weapons of mass destruction" had indeed been found in Iraq, he was merely using a term -- as he has on myriad occasions -- that he wields as a synonym for weapons of mass destruction programs as well.
Bad Iraq Data From Start to Finish
Americans were duped: Evidence of administration manipulation and mendacity just keeps rolling in.

Los Angeles Times -- June 10, 2003

WeaponsGate: The Coming Downfall of Lying Regimes?
CounterPunch -- June 10, 2003
By WAYNE MADSEN

Bush Admin. Now Says Iraqi WMD a 'Program'
Newsday -- June 10, 2003
By Knut Royce
Washington -- Faced with the awkward possibility that no significant caches of weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq, Bush administration officials are recasting their earlier predictions by insisting evidence will emerge that Saddam Hussein at least had a "program" for such weapons.

Bush used the term "program" in three consecutive sentences on the issue Monday. "Iraq had a weapons program," Bush told reporters. "Intelligence throughout the decade showed they had a weapons program. I am absolutely convinced, with time, we'll find out that they did have a weapons program
Intelligence questions
National Journal via Government Executive Magazine -- June 10, 2003


- mark 2-08-2004 4:18 am [link]

The Revised Official Bush Administration History of the War in Iraq
This Modern World -- June 10, 2003

[Trailer Mania strikes again!]
- mark 2-08-2004 12:50 am [link]

Loose Nukes In Iraq Not WMD?
The Rush Limbaugh Show -- June 10, 2003


- mark 2-08-2004 12:22 am [link]

Missing in Action: Saddam's Nuclear Program
Reuters via ENN -- June 10, 2003

By Louis Charbonneau, Reuters
VIENNA — In October, six months before the war on Iraq, the CIA warned that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was close to making a nuclear bomb.

"If Baghdad acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material from abroad, it could make a nuclear weapon within a year," the CIA wrote in a report called "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs."

British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Sept. 24 dossier on Iraq's weapons programs said it would take one to two years.

Washington and London also accused Iraq of making chemical and biological arms, but the idea that Iraq was attempting to create an atomic bomb was the clincher: the doomsday scenario.

"Although chemical and biological weapons can inflict casualties, no threat is greater than the threat of nuclear weapons," Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California, wrote to President George W. Bush in a letter dated June 2. Waxman wrote that he and other members of Congress had voted in favor of the use of force in Iraq largely because of the administration's warnings about Saddam's nuclear program.

In the run-up to the war, the Bush administration repeatedly criticized the Vienna-based U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for finding no evidence that Baghdad had revived its nuclear weapons program, evidence the United States insisted was there.

On March 16, only four days before the war began, Vice President Dick Cheney said, "We know he (Saddam) has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."

The war to disarm Iraq is over, but the proof that Baghdad had revived its nuclear arms program — like Saddam himself — is still missing. And the allies' failure to find clear proof that Iraq had any weapons of mass destruction (WMD) has become a source of embarrassment for both Blair and Bush.

Some lawmakers in the United States and Britain have expressed worries that their governments misrepresented the evidence about Iraq's nuclear capabilities and want Bush to explain his pre-war claims that Iraq was seeking nuclear arms.

Bush and Blair vehemently deny overstating the case for Iraq's weapons programs and stand by the pre-war intelligence they cited.

Blair said allegations that Downing Street had "sexed up" his Iraq arms dossier were "completely untrue" and insisted that Baghdad's WMD would eventually be found.

A top Blair aide Sunday promised to take more care in presenting intelligence material to the public. A spokesman said parts of the dossier from intelligence sources should have been clearly distinguished from publicly available material. Chunks of the report came from a student's 2002 thesis, which itself relied heavily on documents more than a decade old.

Senior Bush administration officials Sunday rejected accusations they exaggerated threats posed by Iraq's weapons, calling the charges "outrageous" and the results of "revisionist history."

FORGED EVIDENCE, RUN-DOWN LABS

Chief U.N. arms inspector Hans Blix's UMOVIC monitoring and verification agency never found proof of chemical or biological arms in Iraq, though his team did uncover al-Samoud missiles that exceeded the 90-mile range permitted by the U.N.

On March 7, IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei told the U.N. Security Council that his arms inspectors in Iraq had found "no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program."

He also said that documents submitted by the United States and Britain as proof that Iraq had tried to import uranium from Niger were forgeries. An IAEA official later said the fakes were so crude that his jaw dropped when he saw them.

When the IAEA asked if there was any other, genuine evidence supporting the Niger import claim, the answer was no.

In an April 11 report to the Security Council, ElBaradei said that after 237 inspections at 148 locations in Iraq, he had been two to three months away from declaring Iraq innocent.

During nearly four months of inspections in Iraq, IAEA inspectors said privately that what they found in Iraq was very different from the looming "mushroom cloud" Bush had said Saddam was capable of unleashing on the world.

"At the various sites that the inspectors visited, they found the conditions of the buildings and equipment were very run-down," said IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming. "We did not find any large industrial capacity that would be required for a nuclear weapons program."

In order to build a conventional nuclear bomb, one would need a dedicated team of scientists and technicians working in pristine laboratory conditions with full access to the requisite equipment and raw materials — something the IAEA did not find.

Blair said in his weapons dossier that Iraq "retained and retains many of its experienced nuclear scientists and technicians who are specialized in the production of fissile material and weapons design."

But the U.N. inspectors also found that this was not the case. On April 11, ElBaradei said, "The core of expertise that existed in 1990 appears to have been disbanded."

While the IAEA found no proof of recent illicit activity, there is no doubt that Iraq had worked hard to develop nuclear arms before the IAEA found and destroyed the program in the 1990s.

The IAEA has said Iraq's secret program was "near success" with its uranium enrichment program and had produced several grams of weapons-grade material. Although this was far from the 55 to 66 pounds needed for a nuclear weapon, it showed Baghdad had the technology and know-how to make a key atomic bomb ingredient.

But even if the U.N. weapons inspectors had been permitted to finish their work in Iraq, ElBaradei said a declaration of Iraq's innocence "would have had a high degree of uncertainty."

"We couldn't rule out that there was a guy sitting somewhere in Iraq working on a design for a nuclear weapon on a computer," IAEA's Fleming said.

For this reason, ElBaradei said the IAEA would stay there permanently "to act as an effective deterrent to — and insurance against — resumption by Iraq of its nuclear weapons program."

- mark 2-08-2004 12:12 am [link]






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