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.
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
[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).
[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.US WMD probe could take 'months'
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.
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.Harman cites 'difficulty' of WMD search
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.
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 destructionNonsmoking 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?Fall Guy?
Thanks for asking.
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 abroadCIA 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.White House in Denial
[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.
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.Powell Defends Iraq WMD Intelligence
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.]
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 saidQuestions 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?Lies, Damned Lies And Military Intelligence
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.
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.Intelligence questions
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
National Journal via Government Executive Magazine -- June 10, 2003
The Revised Official Bush Administration History of the War in Iraq
This Modern World -- June 10, 2003
[Trailer Mania strikes again!]
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."
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."
U.S. Hunt for Iraqi Banned Weapons Slows
Associated Press via Philidelphia Inquirer -- June 10, 2003
By DAFNA LINZER, Associated Press Writer
BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. military units assigned to track down Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have run out of places to look and are getting time off or being assigned to other duties, even as pressure mounts on President Bush (news - web sites) to explain why no banned arms have been found
Al Qaeda links with Iraq denied
Senior leaders interrogated by U.S. agents
New York Times
via Global Exchange -- June 9, 2003
JAMES RISEN
Two of the highest-ranking leaders of Al Qaeda in American custody have told the C.I.A. in separate interrogations that the terrorist organization did not work jointly with the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein, according to several intelligence officials.
Abu Zubaydah, a Qaeda planner and recruiter until his capture in March 2002, told his questioners last year that the idea of working with Mr. Hussein's government had been discussed among Qaeda leaders, but that Osama bin Laden had rejected such proposals, according to an official who has read the Central Intelligence Agency's classified report on the interrogation.
In his debriefing, Mr. Zubaydah said Mr. bin Laden had vetoed the idea because he did not want to be beholden to Mr. Hussein, the official said.
Separately, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Qaeda chief of operations until his capture on March 1 in Pakistan, has also told interrogators that the group did not work with Mr. Hussein, officials said.
The Bush administration has not made these statements public, though it frequently highlighted intelligence reports that supported its assertions of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda as it made its case for war against Iraq.
Since the war ended, and because the administration has yet to uncover evidence of prohibited weapons in Iraq, the quality of American intelligence has come under scrutiny amid contentions that the administration selectively disclosed only those intelligence reports that supported its case for war.
Bill Harlow, a spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency, declined to comment on what the two Qaeda leaders had told their questioners. A senior intelligence official played down the significance of their debriefings, explaining that everything Qaeda detainees say must be regarded with great skepticism.
Other intelligence and military officials added that evidence of possible links between Mr. Hussein's government and Al Qaeda had been discovered — both before the war and since — and that American forces were searching Iraq for more in Iraq.
Still, no conclusive evidence of joint terrorist operations by Iraq and Al Qaeda has been found, several intelligence officials acknowledged, nor have ties been discovered between Baghdad and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on Washington and New York.
Between the time of the attacks and the start of the war in Iraq in March, senior Bush administration officials spoke frequently about intelligence on two fronts — the possibility of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and Baghdad's drive to develop prohibited weapons. President Bush described the war against Iraq as part of the larger war on terrorism, and argued that the possibility that Mr. Hussein might hand over illicit weapons to terrorists posed a threat to the United States.
Several officials said Mr. Zubaydah's debriefing report was circulated by the C.I.A. within the American intelligence community last year, but his statements were not included in public discussions by administration officials about the evidence concerning Iraq-Qaeda ties.
Those officials said the statements by Mr. Zubaydah and Mr. Mohammed were examples of the type of intelligence reports that ran counter to the administration's public case.
"I remember reading the Abu Zubaydah debriefing last year, while the administration was talking about all of these other reports, and thinking that they were only putting out what they wanted," one official said.
Spokesmen at the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon declined to comment on why Mr. Zubaydah's debriefing report was not publicly disclosed by the administration last year.
In recent weeks, the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, and other officials have defended the information and analysis by the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies in the months before the war. They said reports were not suppressed, and were properly handled and distributed among the intelligence agencies.
The issue of the public presentation of the evidence is different from whether the intelligence itself was valid, and some officials said they believed that the former might ultimately prove to be more significant, since the Bush administration relied heavily on the release of intelligence reports to build its case, both with the American people and abroad.
"This gets to the serious question of to what extent did they try to align the facts with the conclusions that they wanted," an intelligence official said. "Things pointing in one direction were given a lot of weight, and other things were discounted."
copyright New York Times
U.S. RIPS WMD SKEPTICS
New York Post -- June 9, 2003
The Bush administration yesterday launched a counterattack against criticism that it overhyped intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction before going to war, calling the sniping "outrageous" and "revisionist history."
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, appearing on ABC's "This Week," pointed to intelligence estimates made in October pegging Iraq's stockpile of chemical agents at between 100 to 500 metric tons.
Bush Asserts Iraq 'Had a Weapons Program'
Associated Press via Mercury News -- June 9, 2003
SCOTT LINDLAW
WASHINGTON - President Bush insisted Monday that Iraq had a weapons program, and the White House asked for patience during a search for evidence to prove it.
As lawmakers considered an investigation into the handling of intelligence that led to war, the White House said it would not resist such an inquiry.
Bush Insists Iraq Had Banned Arms Program
Associated Press via WJXX/WTLV -- June 9, 2003
WASHINGTON -- President Bush insisted Monday that Baghdad had a program to manufacture weapons of mass destruction, seeking to rebut critics who say his administration's credibility is at stake in the search for illicit arms.
Iraqis near nuclear site took ore barrels home
In war's chaos, thirsty villagers drank from contaminated containers
New York Times via SF Chronicle -- June 8, 2003
Patrick E. Tyler, New York Times
"We had to find something to bring water," said Idris Saddoun, 23.
They say they broke into the warehouse, emptied hundreds of radioactive barrels of their yellow and brown mud, took them to wells and canals and filled them with water for cooking, bathing and drinking. The barrels had held uranium ores, low-enriched uranium "yellowcake," nuclear sludge and other dirty byproducts of nuclear research.
Transcript: Colin Powell Talks WMD
Fox News Sunday -- June 8, 2003
Spies threaten Blair with 'smoking gun' over Iraq
Senior intelligence officers kept secret records of meetings after pressure from No 10
The Independent -- June 8, 2003
By Kim Sengupta and Andy McSmith
reprint at Global Policy
Intelligence officers are holding a "smoking gun" which proves that they were subjected to a series of demands by Tony Blair's staff in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Kristol: Bush Made Misstatements on Iraq WMDs
NewsMax -- June 8, 2003
In comments sure to be seized upon by Bush administration critics at home and abroad, one of the leading proponents of the war in Iraq said Sunday that President Bush may have misstated the case that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction before the U.S. attacked.
"We shouldn't deny, those of us who were hawks, that there could have been misstatements made, I think in good faith," Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol told "Fox News Sunday."
Blow to Blair over 'mobile labs'
Saddam's trucks were for balloons, not germs
The Observer -- June 8, 2003
Peter Beaumont and Antony Barnett
Tony Blair faces a fresh crisis over Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, as evidence emerges that two vehicles that he has repeatedly claimed to be Iraqi mobile biological warfare production units are nothing of the sort.
Defense Agency Issues Excerpt on Iraqi Chemical Warfare Program
DIA director Jacoby clarifies press reports on agency assessment
US Department of State -- June 7, 2003
The Defense Department released on June 7 an unclassified excerpt of an earlier Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) study on Iraq's chemical warfare (CW) program in which it stated that there is "no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or where Iraq has -- or will -- establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities."
But the excerpt, drawn from a classified DIA study published in September 2002, also Stated that "Iraq will develop various elements of its chemical industry to achieve self-sufficiency in producing the chemical precursors required for CW agent production." The full excerpt is based on the DIA's analysis titled: "Iraq -- Key WMD Facilities -- An Operational Support Study."
Ex-Official: Evidence Distorted for War
Associated Press via Common Dreams -- June 7, 2003
By JOHN J. LUMPKIN
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration distorted intelligence and presented conjecture as evidence to justify a U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a retired intelligence official who served during the months before the war.
Some Analysts of Iraq Trailers Reject Germ Use
New York Times -- June 7, 2003
By JUDITH MILLER and WILLIAM J. BROAD
American and British intelligence analysts with direct access to the evidence are disputing claims that the mysterious trailers found in Iraq were for making deadly germs. In interviews over the last week, they said the mobile units were more likely intended for other purposes and charged that the evaluation process had been damaged by a rush to judgment.
seen at
eschaton
reprint at Information Clearing House