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.

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:

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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."

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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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

(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

British and American intelligence reports had concluded that a trailer found in Iraq was a biological weapons facility, Prime Minister John Howard said today.

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.

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."

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.

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

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.

[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.]

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

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.

[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.]

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.

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

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

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."