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Mech
Joined: 06 Jun 2001
Posts: 8237
Location: THE 4th REICH USA |
 Sat Feb 07, 2004 7:23 pm
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Pressure on Blair to Publish Evidence For Iraq 45-Minute Claim
By Andrew Grice
The Independent UK
Thursday 05 February 2004
Tony Blair was under pressure yesterday to publish the evidence behind the Government's controversial claim that Saddam Hussein could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes.
Michael Howard, the Tory leader, led demands for the Prime Minister to agree to the call in yesterday's Independent by Brian Jones, the former leading expert on WMD at the Ministry of Defence, for the evidence to be disclosed.
Mr Blair triggered further controversy over the 45-minute claim yesterday when he told MPs that he did not know that it related to only short-range battlefield weapons until the crucial Commons debate last March which authorised the Iraq war - only a day before it began. His official spokesman insisted later that it made no difference, saying: "Battlefield weapons which are modified to carry WMD are WMD."
Yesterday's Commons debate on Lord Hutton's report had to be suspended for 10 minutes when protesters in the public gallery disrupted Mr Blair's opening speech.
Responding to The Independent report, Mr Howard said: "I think that this is very serious indeed. The Prime Minister should publish this intelligence or explain why he can't."
The Tory leader said Dr Jones's article might change his view of the Hutton report, which he accepted last week. "If new evidence becomes available which casts doubt on the Hutton findings, then it would be foolish not to take that new evidence into account."
Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrats' foreign affairs spokesman, said: "The Government hopes that this story will lie down. Every time it tries to drive a stake into it, the story just jumps up again."
Labour's Tam Dalyell challenged Mr Blair about the report when the Prime Minister addressed the Parliamentary Labour Party yesterday.
Downing Street said it would be "foolish" to publish the intelligence behind the 45-minute claim as it could compromise sources. Mr Blair's spokesman said: "Brian Jones is an expert in his field but, as Lord Hutton heard, his concerns were considered by his superiors in the Defence Intelligence Service, both of whom gave evidence and were on the Joint Intelligence Committee, and who did not take up his concerns." |
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JerseyBluEyz
Joined: 09 Jul 2003
Posts: 1257
Location: Northeast |
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Mon Feb 09, 2004 1:09 am
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This is not an article, but a must hear interview from Friday (NOT VERY LONG) between an Australian broadcaster and Scott Ritter (I just love that man!). Ritter accuses Tenet of misrepresentation and deception. I guess that’s a nice way of calling someone a liar. I also love Ritter’s expression – patently false!
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5626.htm
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Mech
Joined: 06 Jun 2001
Posts: 8237
Location: THE 4th REICH USA |
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Mon Feb 09, 2004 4:19 am
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A Nation Damned
We are a nation damned.
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/nationdamned.html
There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We are past being able to pretend otherwise, no matter what comfort might be found in the deception. The United States has invaded and conquered a foreign nation under false pretexts. President Bush and his cronies lied us all into a war.
But that is not why we are damned.
The culmination of decades of accumulated overspending by the government has created an aggregate debt for the United States federal and state governments of $14 trillion dollars. That’s fourteen million million dollars. Or, to put it in a more personal scale, more than $48,000 for every single living human being in the United States, plus the accumulating interest.
The interest on that government debt now exceeds all the personal income tax collected by that government. That means that the government isn’t keeping up with the interest on the debt, let alone able to pay down the principle. Even before the wars started with lies, the US Government was sinking deeper into debt by one third of a trillion dollars every year. With Bush’s war, the debt is increasing at another half trillion every year just at the Federal level. And because the federal Government, struggling with payments on past debts, is sending less money back to the states, the states are sinking deeper into debt as well.
But that is not why we are damned.
The national fiscal crisis is accelerating because of soaring unemployment, and the forced migration of workers from higher paying jobs to lower paying ones. This is occurring for two reasons. The first is that as tax revenues falter, the cash-strapped government raises tax rates. This increases the cost of products and services inside the United States without increasing their quality or desirability. Indeed American companies, struggling to keep prices competitive, are forced to sacrifice quality.
As an inevitable result, American companies have either been driven out of business by foreign competition able to sell superior products at lower prices, or been forced to outsource their own operations to regions with lower tax burdens.
The US Government attempted to conceal this loss of manufacturing with the so-called “Service Economy”, the ludicrous notion that one can prosper a nation by doing each other’s laundry for a fee. But while the moving of cash back and forth for services created more opportunities for taxation, fewer and fewer products were being made within the United States for sales to foreign countries. All the while, Americans were buying foreign-made products because they were of better quality and lower price than American products. Indeed many products needed for every day life are simply not made in the USA any more. When Ampex invented the VCR, they did not even bother approaching American manufacturers but licensed directly to the Japanese. When Seymour Cray was building his supercomputers, the chips he needed were only available from Japanese manufacturers.
Money is flowing out of the country at a billion and a half dollars per day. And as government debt drives taxes higher, the situation can only get worse.
But that is not why we are damned.
Despite the huge government debt, despite the loss of manufacturing over the last 30 years, despite soaring unemployment, despite American women and children sleeping in alleys and eating out of trash cans, the United States government hands out trillions of dollars as gifts to their friends (who used to be their enemies) and to make war on their enemies (who used to be their friends).
But that is not why we are damned.
Maybe the problem is the Congress. Congress is supposed to represent the people, but a body composed of millionaires and lawyers can hardly be expected to understand how to actually make things work. Maybe Congress would better serve the people if it were made up of teachers, doctors, road engineers, factory workers, bakers, people who actually know how to make a nation function, build an infrastructure, and know what it is like to have to live paycheck to paycheck in a nation where the government makes more money off of your work than you do and is always asking for more.
But that is not why we are damned.
We are damned because we know all the above and do nothing. Like the Germans of 1930s Germany we see Der Fuhrer trying to distract the populace from the self-serving choices the government makes by creating a war with lies and deceptions, yet stay silent, less we be accused of being traitors to the national security. We voice our outrage when a rock star bares her breast at a sporting event, because rock stars cannot after all hurt us, raise our taxes, or conscript our children to be crippled or killed in wars. But we remain silent, or at best speak in hushed tones with a trusted few of our concerns about the government, which does hurt us, which does raise our taxes, and which has and continues to conscript our children to be crippled or killed in wars.
We are damned by our silence. We are damned by our inaction. We are damned by our fear to speak out. We are damned by our weakness. We are damned by being sheep under a government of wolves.
We are damned unless and until you realize that your anger and outrage must be targeted where it is needed, not just where it is harmless. We are damned by our willingness to be angry with those who cannot affect our lives, while remaining too afraid to be angry with those who can. We are damned because individuals who refuse to obey the law morally offend us, but we remain enablers of a government that refuses to obey the Constitution. We are damned until WE THE PEOPLE remember that we ARE a people, and that this nation is US.
The President is not the nation. The media is not the nation. The selfish desires of a powerful few are not the nation. The Congress is not the nation.
This nation is 288 million teachers, doctors, bricklayers, road layers, bridging engineers, railroad workers, bakers, grocers, and thousands of others who actually make the nation work. But we seem to have forgotten that simple truth, that wisdom conveyed in those first three words to the Preamble to the Constitution, “We The People”.
The Constitution makes it clear that the nation is the people, and the government only a temporary custodian of our national sovereignty that rules by and only by the leave of the people.
We are damned because we have forgotten that the government is the employee of the people, and that like any employee the government is required to obey orders, not to give them.
We are damned because we have forgotten that as the employers of the government, we have the right to decide what our employees can do and more importantly, what they cannot.
We are damned because we have forgotten who is really supposed to be in charge. |
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Bhang
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Posts: 641
Location: Classified |
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Mon Feb 09, 2004 9:05 am
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Woe is me...
I feel like the soilders I spoke with the other day about Sep.11 Hurt, angry, confused, shamed and most of all indiffrent.
Yeah.
Indiffrent.
Ya know why? Cause I'm over here dodge'n bullets. I'm watching people die on both sides. If I got as angry, as pissed as I should, I would totally flip out. Those soilders I spoke with the other night wanted to kick my ass for talking about their beloved N.Y. and America like I was and I could not really understand why the truth made them act that way. Now I know.
Reading all of the above I felt sick, sadness and most of all pure HATE. I don't even hate the Iraqi's.
I feel like I'm serving a bunch of *#%@ing hartless, %&#*ing pigs and that all this hard work and life risking is for naught.
What do I tell my Grandchildren when they asked what I did in Operation Iraqi Freedom?
"Well kids, I went to war to kill innocent people under false preceptions for a complete and utter liar. We helped get rid a dictator so one of America's dictators could take over, and all in the name of Freedom! God Bless America!"
So for now while I'm here, I will not think this over for it will make me sick and unmotivated. Motivation accomplishs missions and I need it to launch a counter-strike on all the bastards who pervert, rape and pillage the once great country I called home.
People better get it together or there really will be a terorist threat. Homegrown in the backyards of concerned citizens, who feel helpless and are confused between brainwash and truth and feel that violence is the only option - hell why not? The Government does it all the time.
This is not a threat, it's a promise. If things continue the way they are then I got three words for you:
Civil War Two.
I remember how mad I was while I was in school, learning about the system and the lies. I remember the pure hate that lived inside of me, breathing and hungry to vent. I'm calm now, but there are millions still out there and if they do learn, if the picture is painted from top to bottom.... it will come, for the $#@#! has gone on for way too long. Maybe armageddon isn't as far off as I first thought. |
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Bhang
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Posts: 641
Location: Classified |
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Mon Feb 09, 2004 9:19 am
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DISCLAIMER:
Bahng is in no way condoneing violence or terrorist attacks of anykind. He is just experienceing backlash from the harsh realities of truth and has unleashed his first emotions into printed word. Chemtrail Central is not responsible for any actions taken from reading the above material and suggests that you use caution while reading Bhang's outlandish post.
Thank You
[Edited 1 times, lastly by Bhang on 02-09-2004] |
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Mech
Joined: 06 Jun 2001
Posts: 8237
Location: THE 4th REICH USA |
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Mon Feb 09, 2004 5:57 pm
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I hope and pray that America doesnt break out in civil war. Its looking bad.
Id say a viable alternative would simply be to have the states succede from the Union. Arizona is already considering it because they are so pissed off at the Feds.
Now the Bush people are trying to SHIFT the BLAME on people in the pentagon who were simply following orders given to them.
All one has to do is read the PNAC document to see all this stuff was planned.
[Edited 1 times, lastly by Mech on 02-09-2004] |
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Mech
Joined: 06 Jun 2001
Posts: 8237
Location: THE 4th REICH USA |
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Tue Feb 10, 2004 5:06 pm
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Volume 51, Number 3 · February 26, 2004
Feature
Now They Tell Us
By Michael Massing
1.
In recent months, US news organizations have rushed to expose the Bush administration's pre-war failings on Iraq. "Iraq's Arsenal Was Only on Paper," declared a recent headline in The Washington Post. "Pressure Rises for Probe of Prewar-Intelligence," said The Wall Street Journal. "So, What Went Wrong?" asked Time. In The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh described how the Pentagon set up its own intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans, to sift for data to support the administration's claims about Iraq. And on "Truth, War and Consequences," a Frontline documentary that aired last October, a procession of intelligence analysts testified to the administration's use of what one of them called "faith-based intelligence."
Watching and reading all this, one is tempted to ask, where were you all before the war? Why didn't we learn more about these deceptions and concealments in the months when the administration was pressing its case for regime change—when, in short, it might have made a difference? Some maintain that the many analysts who've spoken out since the end of the war were mute before it. But that's not true. Beginning in the summer of 2002, the "intelligence community" was rent by bitter disputes over how Bush officials were using the data on Iraq. Many journalists knew about this, yet few chose to write about it.
Before the war, for instance, there was a loud debate among intelligence analysts over the information provided to the Pentagon by Iraqi opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi and defectors linked to him. Yet little of this seeped into the press. Not until September 29, 2003, for instance, did The New York Times get around to informing readers about the controversy over Chalabi and the defectors associated with him. In a front-page article headlined "Agency Belittles Information Given by Iraqi Defectors," Douglas Jehl reported that a study by the Defense Intelligence Agency had found that most of the information provided by defectors connected to Ahmed Chalabi "was of little or no value." Several defectors introduced to US intelligence by the Iraqi National Congress, Jehl wrote, "invented or exaggerated their credentials as people with direct knowledge of the Iraqi government and its suspected unconventional weapons program."
Why, I wondered, had it taken the Times so long to report this? Around the time that Jehl's article appeared, I ran into a senior editor at the Times and asked him about it. Well, he said, some reporters at the paper had relied heavily on Chalabi as a source and so were not going to write too critically about him.
The editor did not name names, but he did not have to. The Times's Judith Miller has been the subject of harsh criticism. Slate, The Nation, Editor & Publisher, the American Journalism Review, and the Columbia Journalism Review have all run articles accusing her of being too eager to accept official claims before the war and too eager to report the discovery of banned weapons after it.[1] Especially controversial has been Miller's alleged reliance on Chalabi and the defectors who were in touch with him. Last May, Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post wrote of an e-mail exchange between Miller and John Burns, then the Times bureau chief in Baghdad, in which Burns rebuked Miller for writing an article about Chalabi without informing him. Miller replied that she had been covering Chalabi for about ten years and had "done most of the stories about him for our paper." Chalabi, she added, "has provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper."
When asked about this, Miller said that the significance of her ties to Chalabi had been exaggerated. While she had met some defectors through him, she said, only one had resulted in a front-page story on WMD prior to the war. Her assertion that Chalabi had provided most of the Times's front-page exclusives on WMD was, she said, part of "an angry e-mail exchange with a colleague." In the heat of such exchanges, Miller said, "You say things that aren't true. If you look at the record, you'll see they aren't true."
This seems a peculiar admission. Yet on the broader issue of her ties to Chalabi, the record bears Miller out. Before the war, Miller wrote or co-wrote several front-page articles about Iraq's WMD based on information from defectors; only one of them came via Chalabi. An examination of those stories, though, shows that they were open to serious question. The real problem was relying uncritically on defectors of any stripe, whether supplied by Chalabi or not.
This points to a larger problem. In the period before the war, US journalists were far too reliant on sources sympathetic to the administration. Those with dissenting views—and there were more than a few—were shut out. Reflecting this, the coverage was highly deferential to the White House. This was especially apparent on the issue of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction— the heart of the President's case for war. Despite abundant evidence of the administration's brazen misuse of intelligence in this matter, the press repeatedly let officials get away with it. As journalists rush to chronicle the administration's failings on Iraq, they should pay some attention to their own.
2.
On August 26, 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney gave a speech that was widely interpreted as signaling the administration's intention to wage war on Iraq. There "is no doubt," Cheney declared, that Saddam Hussein "has weapons of mass destruction" and is preparing to use them against the United States. Saddam, he said, not only had biological and chemical weapons but had "resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons." If allowed to continue on this course, he added, Saddam could subject his adversaries to "nuclear blackmail." Accordingly, the United States had no choice but to take preemptive action against him.
The reference to nuclear weapons was especially telling. While Iraq was widely believed to have biological and chemical weapons, there was much more uncertainty regarding its nuclear program. In 1998, when UN inspectors left the country, it was generally agreed that Iraq's nuclear program had been dismantled. The question was, what had happened in the four years since? In his speech, Cheney flatly stated that Iraq had resumed its quest for a bomb, but neither he nor any other Bush official offered any supporting evidence.
At the time of Cheney's speech, Times reporters Judith Miller and Michael Gordon were investigating the state of Iraq's arsenal. Both had reported on Iraq for many years and brought certain perspectives to the assignment. Gordon, the paper's chief military correspondent, had after the Gulf War teamed up with retired general Bernard Trainor to write The Generals' War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf (1995). A detailed account of the military's conduct of the war, it strongly criticized the US decision to leave Saddam in power. From his many years of reporting on intelligence matters, Gordon knew how shocked US analysts had been after the Gulf War to find how far along Iraq had been in its effort to develop a nuclear weapon.
Miller, the coauthor of Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf (1990) and Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War (2001), was intimately acquainted with Saddam Hussein's genius for deception. In February 1998, she (together with William Broad) had written a 4,900-word report about Iraq's secret program to produce bioweapons and its success in concealing them from the outside world. According to the story, many former weapons inspectors and other experts with whom Miller and Broad talked believed that Baghdad "is still hiding missiles and germ weapons, and the means to make both."
Later that year, Miller met one of the first defectors who gave her information—Khidhir Hamza, a scientist who, until the late 1980s, had been a senior official in Iraq's nuclear program. After fleeing Baghdad in 1994, Hamza had made his way to Washington, where in 1997 he went to work for the Institute for Science and International Security, a small think tank, which arranged for Miller and fellow Times reporter James Risen to interview him. The result was a front-page story relating Hamza's account of the "inner workings" of Saddam's push for a bomb prior to the Gulf War, and recounting Hamza's belief that Saddam retained the infrastructure to duplicate that effort.
While seeing Hamza, Miller told me, she also was in touch with Ahmed Chalabi, and in 2001 he arranged for her to visit Thailand to interview another defector, a civil engineer named Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri. The resulting front-page story related al-Haideri's claim to have personally renovated "secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons." These facilities were said to exist "in underground wells, private villas and under Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad." Charles Duelfer, a former inspector, was quoted as saying that al-Haideri's account was consistent with other reports showing that Iraq had "not given up its desire" for WMD.
In 2002, Miller went to Turkey to interview yet another defector, Ahmed al-Shemri. A member of the Iraqi Officers Movement, another opposition group, al-Shemri (a pseudonym) claimed to have worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program, and he told Miller that Saddam had continued to produce VX and other chemical agents even while international inspectors were in Iraq. Iraq, he added, continued to store such agents at secret sites throughout the country.
By late summer of 2002, then, Miller had developed a circle of sources who claimed to have firsthand knowledge of Saddam's continued push for prohibited weapons. And as she and Gordon made the rounds of administration officials, they picked up a dramatic bit of information about Iraq's nuclear program. During the previous fourteen months, they were told, Iraq had tried to import thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes. The tubes had been intercepted, and specialists sent to examine them had concluded from their diameter, thickness, and other technical properties that they had only one possible use—as casings for rotors in centrifuges to enrich uranium, a key step in producing an atomic bomb.
This was dramatic news. If true, it would represent a rare piece of concrete evidence for Saddam's nuclear aspirations. And, on Sunday, September 8, 2002, the Times (then under the editorship of Howell Raines) led with the story, written by Miller and Gordon. "US Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts," the headline said. The lead was emphatic:
More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today.
Gordon and Miller went on to cite the officials' claims about the aluminum tubes and their intended use in centrifuges to enrich uranium.
The article contained several caveats, noting, for instance, that Iraq "is not on the verge of fielding a nuclear weapon." Overall, though, the language was stark:
Mr. Hussein's dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq's push to improve and expand Baghdad's chemical and biological arsenals, have brought Iraq and the United States to the brink of war.
Administration "hard-liners," Gordon and Miller added, worried that "the first sign of a 'smoking gun'... may be a mushroom cloud." The piece concluded with a section on Iraq's chemical and biological weapons, relying heavily on the information supplied by Ahmed al-Shemri. "All of Iraq is one large storage facility," he was quoted as saying.
Gordon and Miller argue that the information about the aluminum tubes was not a leak. "The administration wasn't really ready to make its case publicly at the time," Gordon told me. "Somebody mentioned to me this tubes thing. It took a lot to check it out." Perhaps so, but administration officials were clearly delighted with the story. On that morning's talk shows, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice all referred to the information in the Times story. "It's now public," Cheney said on Meet the Press, that Saddam Hussein "has been seeking to acquire" the "kind of tubes" needed to build a centrifuge to produce highly enriched uranium, "which is what you have to have in order to build a bomb." On CNN's Late Edition, Rice said the tubes "are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs." She added: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud"—a phrase lifted directly from the Times.
In the days that followed, the story of the tubes received wide publicity. And, on September 12, 2002, President Bush himself, in a speech to the UN General Assembly, said that "Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon"— evidence, he added, of its "continued appetite" for such a weapon. In the following months, the tubes would become a key prop in the administration's case for war, and the Times played a critical part in legitimizing it.
3.
From the start, however, the Times story raised doubts among many nuclear experts. One was David Albright. A physicist and former weapons inspector who directed the Institute for Science and International Security (the same group for which the defector Khidhir Hamza had worked), Albright favored a tough position on Iraq, believing Saddam to have WMD and advocating strict measures to contain him. In the summer of 2001, however, after the aluminum tubes were intercepted, he had been asked by an official to find out some information about them, and in doing so he had learned of the doubts many experts had about their suitability for use in centrifuges. Some specialists with ties to the US Department of Energy and the International Atomic Energy Agency had concluded that the tubes were more likely destined for use in conventional artillery rockets, as Iraq itself had claimed. Officials at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research would later concur.
Reading the September 8 article, Albright felt it was important for the Times to take note of these dissenting views. In the past, he had worked frequently with Judith Miller; in fact, it was Albright who had arranged for her to interview Khidhir Hamza. Although he was unavailable when Miller tried to contact him for the September 8 story, he had several long conversations with her after it was published. He then described the doubts many centrifuge experts had about the administration's claims. And, on September 13, 2002, a follow-up story appeared. It was not, however, what Albright had expected. Six paragraphs into an article that summarized the White House's case against Iraq, Miller and Gordon noted that senior officials acknowledged "that there have been debates among intelligence experts about Iraq's intentions in trying to buy such tubes." But, they quickly noted, those officials insisted that "the dominant view" in the administration was that the tubes were intended for use in centrifuges to enrich uranium. While some experts in the State and Energy Departments "had questioned whether Iraq might not be seeking the tubes for other purposes," the article stated,
other, more senior, officials insisted last night that this was a minority view among intelligence experts and that the CIA had wide support, particularly among the government's top technical experts and nuclear scientists. "This is a footnote, not a split," a senior administration official said.
Yet Albright, having talked with a large number of those experts and scientists, knew that many did not support the CIA assessment. "Understanding the purpose of these tubes was very difficult," he told me.
But hearing there's a debate in the government was knowable by a journalist. That's what I asked Judy to do—to alert people that there's a debate, that there are competent people who disagreed with what the CIA was saying. I thought for sure she'd quote me or some people in the government who didn't agree. It just wasn't there.
The Times, he added,
made a decision to ice out the critics and insult them on top of it. People were bitter about that article—it says that the best scientists are with [the administration].
Miller rejects this. The article, she says, clearly stated that there was a debate about the tubes. As written, however, the piece gives far more attention and credence to officials who dismissed the dissenters, and the debate, as inconsequential—a "footnote."
Frustrated, Albright began preparing his own report about the tubes. Seeking an outlet, he approached Joby Warrick of The Washington Post. In contrast to Miller and Gordon, Warrick had little experience covering national security matters; the environment was his beat. After the September 11 attacks, however, he was assigned to do investigative reporting related to the war on terrorism, and in the summer of 2002 he began looking into Iraq's weapons programs. Calling around to officials and former inspectors, he quickly discovered that "nobody knew very much." That, he told me, seemed particularly true of defectors. Francis Brooke, the Washington representative of the Iraqi National Congress, was constantly trying to give him information, but it never seemed to check out. "I became very frustrated at not being able to come up with anything solid showing that there were active weapons programs," Warrick said.
Albright's report about the aluminum tubes, however, seemed to offer an inside look at the debate within intelligence circles over Iraq's nuclear program.[2] Drawing on it, Warrick wrote an article describing how the administration's claims about the tubes were being challenged by "independent experts" who questioned whether they "were intended for a secret nuclear weapons program" or, as some believed, for use in conventional rockets. Warrick also noted reports that the Bush administration "is trying to quiet dissent among its own analysts over how to interpret the evidence." It was one of the first public mentions of the administration's possible misuse of the data on Iraq. Appearing on page A18, however, the story caused little stir.
4.
Meanwhile, the tubes were drawing the notice of Knight Ridder's Washington bureau, which serves Knight Ridder's thirty-one newspapers in the US, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, and The Detroit Free Press. Almost alone among national news organizations, Knight Ridder had decided to take a hard look at the administration's justifications for war. As Washington bureau chief John Walcott recalled, in the late summer of 2002 "we began hearing from sources in the military, the intelligence community, and the foreign service of doubts about the arguments the administration was making." Much of the dissent came from career officers disturbed over the allegations being made by political appointees. "These people," he said, "were better informed about the details of the intelligence than the people higher up in the food chain, and they were deeply troubled by what they regarded as the administration's deliberate misrepresentation of intelligence, ranging from overstating the case to outright fabrication."
Walcott assigned two experienced reporters, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, to talk with those sources. Drawing on them, Landay in early September 2002 filed a report for Knight Ridder that quoted senior US officials with access to intelligence on Iraq as saying that "they have detected no alarming increase in the threat that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein poses to American security and Middle East stability." While it was well known that Iraq was "aggressively trying to rebuild" its weapons programs, Landay noted, "there is no new intelligence that indicates the Iraqis have made significant advances" in doing so.
In early October, Landay's curiosity was further aroused when the CIA released a declassified version of its new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. For the most part, the document blandly summarized the agency's longstanding findings regarding Iraq's ties to terrorists and its efforts to develop WMD. In a brief section on the aluminum tubes, however, it noted that, while the intelligence community as a whole believed the tubes were intended for use in centrifuges, some experts disagreed, believing they were intended for conventional weapons. This was a rare public acknowledgment of dissent within the intelligence agencies, and Landay, intrigued, began making more calls. He eventually reached a veteran of the US uranium enrichment program. "He'd been given data on the tubes, and he said that this wasn't conclusive evidence," Landay recalled. In early October, Landay wrote about how the CIA report had "exposed a sharp dispute among US intelligence experts" over Iraq's arsenal. One expert was quoted as saying he did not believe the tubes were intended for use in nuclear weapons because "their diameters were too small and the aluminum they were made from was too hard."
On October 8, 2002, Landay and Strobel, joined by bureau chief Walcott, filed a sharp account of the rising discontent among national security officers. "While President Bush marshals congressional and international support for invading Iraq," the article began, "a growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals and diplomats in his own government privately have deep misgivings about the administration's double-time march toward war." These officials, it continued,
charge that administration hawks have exaggerated evidence of the threat that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein poses—including distorting his links to the al-Qaida terrorist network.... They charge that the administration squelches dissenting views and that intelligence analysts are under intense pressure to produce reports supporting the White House's argument that Saddam poses such an immediate threat to the United States that pre-emptive military action is necessary.
As these reports show, there were many sources available to journalists interested in scrutinizing the administration's statements about Iraq. Unfortunately, however, Knight Ridder has no newspaper in Washington, D.C., or New York, and its stories did not get the national attention they deserved. But in mid-October, other news organizations began to pick up on some of the same discontent Knight Ridder had documented. The Washington Post, the Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the Guardian of London all ran articles raising questions about the administration's case for war. On October 10, The New York Times ran a front-page account by Michael Gordon of the divisions within the administration "over what intelligence shows about Iraq's intentions and its willingness to ally itself with al-Qaeda." And on October 24, the Times, again on its front page, reported that top Pentagon officials had set up a special intelligence unit to search for data to support the case for war. Written by Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt, the article cited the concerns of some intelligence analysts that civilian policymakers were politicizing the intelligence to fit their hawkish position. The view "among even some senior intelligence analysts" at the CIA, they wrote, "is that Mr. Hussein is contained and is unlikely to unleash weapons of mass destruction unless he is attacked."
The unit referred to here was the Office of Special Plans, the same group Seymour Hersh would write about after the war. As such reports show, its existence was widely known before the war. With many analysts prepared to discuss the competing claims over the intelligence on Iraq, the press was in a good position to educate the public on the administration's justifications for war. Yet for the most part, it never did so. A survey of the coverage in November, December, and January reveals relatively few articles about the debate inside the intelligence community. Those articles that did run tended to appear on the inside pages. Most investigative energy was directed at stories that supported, rather than challenged, the administration's case.
On December 12, for example, The Washington Post ran a front-page story by Barton Gellman contending that al-Qaeda had obtained a nerve agent from Iraq. Most of the evidence came from administration officials, and it was so shaky as to draw the attention of Michael Getler, the paper's ombudsman. In his weekly column, Getler wrote that the article had so many qualifiers and caveats that
the effect on the complaining readers, and on me, is to ask what, after all, is the use of this story that practically begs you not to put much credence in it? Why was it so prominently displayed, and why not wait until there was more certainty about the intelligence?
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Mech
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And why, he might have added, didn't the Post and other papers devote more time to pursuing the claims about the administration's manipulation of intelligence? Part of the explanation, no doubt, rests with the Bush administration's skill at controlling the flow of news. "Their management of information is far greater than that of any administration I've seen," Knight Ridder's John Walcott observed. "They've made it extremely difficult to do this kind of [investigative] work." That management could take both positive forms—rewarding sympathetic reporters with leaks, background interviews, and seats on official flights—and negative ones— freezing out reporters who didn't play along. In a city where access is all, few wanted to risk losing it.
Such sanctions were reinforced by the national political climate. With a popular president promoting war, Democrats in Congress were reluctant to criticize him. This deprived reporters of opposition voices to quote, and of hearings to cover. Many readers, meanwhile, were intolerant of articles critical of the President. Whenever The Washington Post ran such pieces, reporter Dana Priest recalls, "We got tons of hate mail and threats, calling our patriotism into question." Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and The Weekly Standard, among others, all stood ready to pounce on journalists who strayed, branding them liberals or traitors—labels that could permanently damage a career. Gradually, journalists began to muzzle themselves.
David Albright experienced this firsthand when, during the fall, he often appeared as a commentator on TV. "I felt a lot of pressure" from journalists "to stick to the subject, which was Iraq's bad behavior," Albright says. And that, in turn, reflected pressure from the administration: "I always felt the administration was setting the agenda for what stories should be covered, and the news media bought into that, rather than take a critical look at the administration's underlying reasons for war." Once, on a cable news show, Albright said that he felt the inspections should continue, that the impasse over Iraq was not simply France's fault; during the break, he recalls, the host "got really mad and chastised me."
"The administration created a set of truths, then put up a wall to keep people within it," Albright says. "On the other side of the wall were people saying they didn't agree. The media were not aggressive enough in challenging this."
5.
The press's submissiveness was most apparent in its coverage of the inspections process. Responsibility for that process lay with two organizations: the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitored Iraq's nuclear activities, and the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, which oversaw its biological and chemical programs. UNMOVIC, which was based in New York and headed by Hans Blix, got considerable coverage; the IAEA, which was based in Vienna and headed by Mohamed ElBaradei, got little.
"We were constantly frustrated," Melissa Fleming, an IAEA spokesperson, told me. "The whole focus was on UNMOVIC, which was in New York." According to IAEA staff members, the press gave far too much weight to what US experts or administration officials said. Jacques Baute, the head of the IAEA's Iraq inspection team, complained that the agency had a hard time getting its story out. And that story, he explained, was that by 1998 "it was pretty clear we had neutralized Iraq's nuclear program. There was unanimity on that."
The IAEA's success in dismantling Iraq's nuclear program was spelled out in the periodic reports it sent to the UN Security Council—reports that remained posted on its Web site. And, it was broadly agreed, any effort to restart that program after 1998 would have very likely been detected by the outside world. As the Carnegie Endowment noted in a recent report ("WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications"),
Iraq's nuclear program had been dismantled by inspectors after the 1991 war, and these facilities— unlike chemical or biological ones —tend to be large, expensive, dependent on extensive imports, and very difficult to hide "in plain sight" under the cover of commercial (that is, dual-use) facilities.
These facts, it added, were "largely knowable" in the fall of 2002, when the debate over inspections was taking place.
Bush officials, however, were loudly proclaiming otherwise. "A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of [Saddam's] compliance with UN resolutions," Vice President Cheney declared in his August 26 speech. "On the contrary, there is a great danger it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow 'back in his box.'"
Many journalists echoed this line. Seeking out former weapons inspectors for comment, they generally "gravitated to the most negative ones," Jacques Baute said. An example was David Kay. According to the IAEA, his background in nuclear and weapons matters was very limited—he has a Ph.D. in international affairs—and he spent no more than five weeks as an inspector in Iraq in 1991. This was far less time—and far longer ago—than was the case for many other inspectors.
Recently, Kay, after stepping down as the top US weapons investigator in Iraq, said that he thought Iraq had largely abandoned the production of illicit weapons during the 1990s and that one key reason was the tough UN inspections. Before the war, however, Kay often declared his contempt for inspections to reporters—including Judith Miller. On September 18, 2002, for instance, in an article headlined "Verification Is Difficult at Best, Say the Experts, and Maybe Impossible," Miller quoted a variety of officials and former inspectors about the nearly insurmountable obstacles inspectors would face if they returned to Iraq. David Kay, identified as "a former inspector who led the initial nuclear inspections in Iraq in the early 1990's," was quoted as saying of the inspectors that "their task is damn near a mission impossible." Miller also cited Khidhir Hamza, the defector she had written about in 1998. Identified as having "led part of Iraq's nuclear bomb program until he defected in 1994," he was quoted as estimating that "Iraq was now at the 'pilot plant' stage of nuclear production and within two to three years of mass producing centrifuges to enrich uranium for a bomb." Iraq, he added, "now excelled" in hiding nuclear and other unconventional weapons programs.
In fact, Hamza never produced any convincing sources for these statements. Contrary to Miller's description, he had resigned from Iraq's nuclear program in 1990 and had no firsthand knowledge of it after the Gulf War. After coming to the United States, he had gone to work for David Albright's Institute for Science and International Security, but by 1999 his claims about Iraq's weapons programs had become so inflated that Albright felt he could no longer work with him, and Hamza left the institute. The following year he came out with a book, Saddam's Bombmaker: The Terrifying Inside Story of the Iraqi Nuclear and Biological Weapons Agenda (written with Jeff Stein), that, Albright says, "made many ridiculous claims." In light of this, he adds, he was surprised to see that Judith Miller continued to rely on Hamza. "Judy should have known about this," Albright says. "This is her area."
"Hamza had no credibility at all," one IAEA staff member told me. "Journalists who called us and asked for an assessment of these people— we'd certainly tell them." Miller said she believed Hamza was a credible source because he was very useful to the administration. After the war, she noted, the administration sent him to Iraq to work on atomic energy matters. Yet the administration's reliance on defectors like Hamza was itself highly controversial and deserving of scrutiny. Few journalists provided it, though. In the months leading up to the war, Hamza was a popular source for journalists and a frequent guest on TV news shows. (In fairness, it should be noted that Judith Miller, along with Julia Preston, wrote an article for the Times in late January that, based on a two-hour interview with Hans Blix, described his differences with the Bush administration over its "assertions about Iraqi cheating" and "the notion that time was running out for disarming Iraq through peaceful means.")
In late November 2002, UN inspectors finally returned to Iraq. Shortly after, Iraq submitted to the UN a 12,000-page declaration stating it had no weapons of mass destruction. Iraq's failure to account for large stocks of banned weapons uncovered prior to 1998 fed suspicions that it still had such weapons. Nonetheless, IAEA inspectors felt confident that they could get a reliable reading of the status of Iraq's alleged nuclear program. They had more than a hundred sites they wanted to visit, based on interviews with defectors, data collected from previous inspections, satellite photos, and information provided by the CIA and other US intelligence agencies. Over the summer, IAEA specialists had detected in satellite photos new construction at sites where nuclear activity had taken place in the past. Visiting them, however, inspectors found no suspicious activity. The inspectors also took samples from rivers, canals, and lakes, testing for the presence of certain radioisotopes. None was found.
Finally, the inspectors investigated Iraq's attempted purchase of aluminum tubes. They examined rocket production and storage sites, studied tube samples, and interviewed key Iraqi personnel. From this they determined that the tubes were consistent with use in conventional rockets, as Iraq had maintained.
On January 9, 2003, Mohamed ElBaradei issued a preliminary report on the inspectors' work. "To date," it noted,
no new information of significance has emerged regarding Iraq's past nuclear programme (pre-1991) or with regard to Iraq activities during the period between 1991 and 1998. To date, no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear-related activities has been detected, although not all of the laboratory results of sample analysis are yet available.
On the aluminum tubes, ElBaradei reported that they
appear to be consistent with reverse engineering of rockets. While it would be possible to modify such tubes for the manufacture of centrifuges, they are not directly suitable for it.
In short, the IAEA, after weeks of intensive inspections, had found no sign whatever of any effort by Iraq to resume its nuclear program. Given the importance the administration had attached to this matter, this would have seemed news of the utmost significance. Yet it was largely ignored. The Times, which had so prominently displayed its initial story about the aluminum tubes, buried its main article about ElBaradei's statement on page A10. (The paper did briefly mention ElBaradei's conclusion about the tubes in a front-page story that focused mainly on Iraq's lack of cooperation with the inspectors.) One of the few papers to give his statement significant treatment was The Washington Post. Following up on his earlier article on the tubes, Joby Warrick incorporated the IAEA findings into a detailed analysis of the claims and counterclaims surrounding the tubes. The article cited weapons inspectors, scientists, and other experts, all of whom cast strong doubt on the administration's arguments.[3]
The IAEA, Melissa Fleming observed, "was inundated with calls, but they were less of an investigative nature than about what the inspectors were finding on a daily basis. In general reporters showed little interest in more complex subjects like the aluminum tubes." Mark Gwozdecky, the IAEA's top spokesperson, added: "Nobody wanted to challenge the President. Nobody wanted to believe inspections had anything of value to bring to the table. The press bought into that."
6.
The reception accorded Mohamed ElBaradei's statement contrasted sharply with that given Colin Powell's speech at the United Nations on February 5, 2003. The secretary of state gave a high-tech presentation of intercepted tapes, satellite photos, videos, and diagrams to demonstrate what he called "a policy of evasion and deception" by Iraq dating back to 1991. Iraq's arsenal, Powell asserted, included mobile laboratories to produce bioweapons, unmanned aerial vehicles to deliver them, and chemical munitions plants. On the nuclear issue, Powell said that "Saddam Hussein is determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb. He is so determined that he has made repeated covert attempts to acquire high-specification aluminum tubes from 11 countries, even after inspections resumed." Powell also asserted the existence of a "sinister nexus" between Iraq and al-Qaeda, citing as evidence the activities of Ansar al-Islam, a militant Islamic group based in northeastern Iraq. The group, he said, operated a poison-making camp in the region and had strong links to Iraqi intelligence.
The speech, while viewed skeptically by most foreign governments, received high approval ratings in American polls—and rapturous reviews from the American press. On CNN, after General Amer al-Saadi, Saddam Hussein's scientific adviser, appeared to offer a point-by-point rebuttal of Powell's charges, anchor Paula Zahn brought on former State Department spokesman James Rubin to comment. Introducing Rubin, Zahn said, "You've got to understand that most Americans watching this were either probably laughing out loud or got sick to their stomach. Which was it for you?"
"Well, really, both," Rubin replied. The American people "will believe everything they saw," he said. "They have no reason to doubt any of [Powell's] sources, any of the references to human sources, any of the pictures, or any of the intercepts."
The next day's New York Times carried three front-page articles on Powell's speech, all of them glowing. His presentation took "the form of a nearly encyclopedic catalog that reached further than many had expected," wrote Steven Weisman. According to Patrick Tyler, an "intelligence breakthrough" had made it possible for Powell "to set forth the first evidence of what he said was a well developed cell of Al Qaeda operating out of Baghdad." The speech, he wrote, was "a more detailed and well-documented bill of particulars than many had expected."
The Washington Post was no less positive. "Data on Efforts to Hide Arms Called 'Strong Suit of Speech'" went one headline. "Agency Coordination Helps Yield Details on Al Qaeda 'Associate'" went another. In an editorial titled "Irrefutable," the paper asserted that, after Powell's performance, "it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction." The Op-Ed page ran four pieces about the speech—all of them full of praise. "An Old Trooper's Smoking Gun," stated the headline atop Jim Hoagland's column. Even the normally skeptical Mary McGrory pitched in with a favorable assessment, headlined, "I'm Persuaded."
Tucked inside each paper, however, were articles that questioned the quality of Powell's evidence. In the Times, for instance, C.J. Chivers reported (on page A22) that Kurdish officials in northern Iraq were puzzled by Powell's claims of a poison-making facility in the area. A few days later, after visiting the purported camp, he found it to be a "wholly unimpressive place" that lacked even plumbing. In the Post, Joby Warrick raised questions about Powell's claims regarding the aluminum tubes. (This time, though, those questions were relegated to page A29). Newsweek accompanied its article on the speech with five boxes evaluating Powell's key claims; each raised significant doubts. On his charge that Iraq had mobile biogerm labs, for instance, the magazine observed that experts believed such labs "would be all but unworkable" and that US intelligence, "after years of looking for them, has never found even one."
In the weeks following the speech, one journalist—Walter Pincus of The Washington Post—developed strong reservations about it. A longtime investigative reporter, Pincus went back and read the UN inspectors' reports of 1998 and 1999, and he was struck to learn from them how much weaponry had been destroyed in Iraq before 1998. He also tracked down General Anthony Zinni, the former head of the US Central Command, who described the hundreds of weapons sites the United States had destroyed in its 1998 bombing. All of this, Pincus recalled, "made me go back and read Powell's speech closely. And you could see that it was all inferential. If you analyzed all the intercepted conversations he discussed, you could see that they really didn't prove anything."
By mid-March, Pincus felt he had enough material for an article questioning the administration's claims on Iraq. His editors weren't interested. It was only after the intervention of his colleague Bob Woodward, who was researching a book on the war and who had developed similar doubts, that the editors agreed to run the piece—on page A17. Despite the administration's claims about Iraq's WMD, it began, "US intelligence agencies have been unable to give Congress or the Pentagon specific information about the amounts of banned weapons or where they are hidden...." Noting the pressure intelligence analysts were feeling from the White House and Pentagon, Pincus wrote that senior officials, in making the case for war, "repeatedly have failed to mention the considerable amount of documented weapons destruction that took place in Iraq between 1991 and 1998."
Two days later, Pincus, together with Dana Milbank, the Post's White House correspondent, was back with an even more critical story. "As the Bush administration prepares to attack Iraq this week," it began, "it is doing so on the basis of a number of allegations against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that have been challenged—and in some cases disproved —by the United Nations, European governments and even US intelligence reports." That story appeared on page A13.[4]
The placement of these stories was no accident, Pincus says. "The front pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times are very important in shaping what other people think," he told me. "They're like writing a memo to the White House." But the Post's editors, he said, "went through a whole phase in which they didn't put things on the front page that would make a difference."
7.
The Post was not alone. The nearer the war drew, and the more determined the administration seemed to wage it, the less editors were willing to ask tough questions. The occasional critical stories that did appear were, like Pincus's, tucked well out of sight.
The performance of the Times was especially deficient. While occasionally running articles that questioned administration claims, it more often deferred to them. (The Times's editorial page was consistently much more skeptical.) Compared to other major papers, the Times placed more credence in defectors, expressed less confidence in inspectors, and paid less attention to dissenters. The September 8 story on the aluminum tubes was especially significant. Not only did it put the Times's imprimatur on one of the administration's chief claims, but it also established a position at the paper that apparently discouraged further investigation into this and related topics.
The reporters working on the story strongly disagree. That the tubes were intended for centrifuges "was the dominant view of the US intelligence community," Michael Gordon told me. "It looks like it's the wrong view. But the story captured what was and still is the majority view of the intelligence community—whether right or wrong." Not only the director of central intelligence but also the secretary of state decided to support it, Gordon said, adding,
Most of the intelligence agencies in the US government thought that Iraq had something. Both Clinton and Bush officials thought this. So did Richard Butler, who had been head of UNSCOM and who wrote a book about Iraq called "The Greatest Threat." So it was a widely shared assumption in and out of government. I don't recall a whole lot of people challenging that.
Yet there were many people challenging the administration's assertions. It's revealing that Gordon encountered so few of them. On the aluminum tubes, David Albright, as noted above, made a special effort to alert Judith Miller to the dissent surrounding them, to no avail.
Asked about this, Miller said that as an investigative reporter in the intelligence area, "my job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal." Many journalists would disagree with this; instead, they would consider offering an independent evaluation of official claims one of their chief responsibilities.
I asked Miller about her December 20, 2001, article about Saeed al-Haideri, the Chalabi-linked defector who claimed that Saddam Hussein had a network of hidden sites for producing and storing banned weapons— sites said to include the ground under Saddam Hussein Hospital. In a subsequent piece about the Bush administration's use of defectors, Miller had stated that al-Haideri's interviews with US intelligence had "resulted in dozens of highly credible reports on Iraqi weapons-related activity and purchases." Yet neither UN inspectors nor the Iraq Survey Group was able to confirm any of those reports. Al-Haideri, Miller acknowledges, "might have been totally wrong, but I believe he was acting in good faith, and it was the best we could do at the time."
To this day, neither Miller nor the Times as a whole has reported on the failure to confirm al-Haideri's claims. Miller says that while the paper hasn't reported on al-Haideri's specific allegations, it did do "fifteen stories on weapons not found in Iraq." Yet, in view of the prominence the Times had given al-Haideri's claims, its failure to follow up on them suggests a lack of interest in correcting reports that were later contradicted by the evidence. (By contrast, the BBC show Panorama, which in September 2002 had reported some of al-Haideri's claims, noted pointedly in a follow-up program aired in November 2003 that the Iraq Survey Group had searched for but "found none of the laboratory facilities described by Mr. Haideri, including a bunker under a hospital.")
Looking back at her coverage of Iraq's weapons, Miller insists that the problem lies with the intelligence, not the reporting. "The fact that the United States so far hasn't found WMD in Iraq is deeply disturbing. It raises real questions about how good our intelligence was. To beat up on the messenger is to miss the point."
If nothing else, the Iraq saga should cause journalists to examine the breadth of their sources. "One question worth asking," John Walcott of Knight Ridder says, "is whether we in journalism have become too reliant on high-level officials instead of cultivating less glamorous people in the bowels of the bureaucracy. "In the case of Iraq, he added, the political appointees "really closed ranks. So if you relied exclusively on traditional news sources—assistant secretaries and above—you would not have heard things we heard." What Walcott calls "the blue collar" employees of the agencies—the working analysts or former analysts—were drawn on extensively by Knight Ridder, but by few others.
Since the end of the war, journalists have found no shortage of sources willing to criticize the administration. (Even Colin Powell, in a recent press conference, admitted that, contrary to his assertions at the United Nations, he had no "smoking gun" proof of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.) The Washington Post has been especially aggressive in exposing the administration's exaggerations of intelligence, its inadequate planning for postwar Iraq, and its failure to find weapons of mass destruction. Barton Gellman, who before the war worked so hard to ferret out Iraq's ties to terrorists, has, since its conclusion, written many incisive articles about the administration's intelligence failures.[5]
The contrast between the press's feistiness since the end of the war and its meekness before it highlights one of the most entrenched and disturbing features of American journalism: its pack mentality. Editors and reporters don't like to diverge too sharply from what everyone else is writing. When a president is popular and a consensus prevails, journalists shrink from challenging him. Even now, papers like the Times and the Post seem loath to give prominent play to stories that make the administration look too bad. Thus, stories about the increasing numbers of dead and wounded in Iraq —both American and Iraqi—are usually consigned to page 10 or 12, where they won't cause readers too much discomfort.
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Mech
Joined: 06 Jun 2001
Posts: 8237
Location: THE 4th REICH USA |
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Wed Feb 11, 2004 6:57 pm
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Defence Expert Fears Public Backlash on Wmd Threat
By Gavin Cordon, Whitehall Editor, PA News
A retired intelligence official who gave key evidence to the Hutton Inquiry warned today that efforts to counter the spread of weapons of mass destruction could be undermined by “false expectations” raised about Iraq’s arsenal.
Dr Bryan Jones, the former head of the branch in the Defence Intelligence Staff looking at nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, said he did not expect any weapons stockpiles to be discovered in Iraq.
In an interview with The Independent, he said the intelligence assessment before the war which included the controversial 45 minute claim had merely outlined “possible scenarios” rather than detailing any specific threat.
“The fact was, it was so nebulous that there was nothing you could really hang your hat on,” he said.
He warned that the public would be far more sceptical in future if the Government tried to warn of another WMD threat elsewhere in the world.
“There is a great danger that the whole Iraq issue is now muddying the pond. People have been told to look in that direction, ‘here is something to worry about’,” he said.
“Suddenly it appears there was nothing. Personally I don’t think they will find stockpiles in Iraq and
people] have been given a false expectation that they were there.
“So people will say WMD in general was never a problem because the whole thing was a political sleight of hand.”
The interview is the second time that Dr Jones has spoken out publicly since Lord Hutton published his report last month on the death of government weapons expert Dr David Kelly.
Last week, in an article for the same paper, he blamed senior intelligence officials for “misinterpreting” the evidence about Saddam’s weapons programmes and ignoring the advice of their own technical experts.
He disclosed that he had lodged a formal complaint over the Government’s Iraq weapons dossier because he had feared that he and his colleagues would be made “scapegoats” when no weapons were found. |
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Mech
Joined: 06 Jun 2001
Posts: 8237
Location: THE 4th REICH USA |
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Wed Feb 11, 2004 9:15 pm
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WMD critic Scott Ritter Exhonorated
02-09-2004
Hack's Target
Calling Maj. Ritter
http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=Hacks%20
Target%20Homepage.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=52&rnd=452.25303574684744
By David H. Hackworth
Like it or not, Maj. Scott Ritter had it right all along.
Most of the rest of us, from the president to his key advisers, such as Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, Wolfowitz and Tenet, to the majority of Congress and to most of the talking heads – including the pre-Iraq War NBC analyst David Kay, who reported WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) behind every Iraqi sand dune – blew it big-time when it came down to the awesome arsenal that Saddam had supposedly squirreled away.
Ritter, the United Nations’ chief weapons inspector in Iraq until 1998, took us all on – virtually alone, against incredible odds – stating, “Iraq is not a threat to the U.S.,” and begging the American people to take charge and not “sit back and allow your government to go to war against Iraq ... (without all) the facts on the table to back this war up.”
As per his reputation on training fields and battlefields, this granite-jawed former Marine stood his ground and never flinched. He reminds me of another two-fisted, tell-it-like-it-is Marine, Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, the recipient of two Medals of Honor, who was almost drummed out of the Marine Corps twice: Once in the 1930s for calling Benito Mussolini a “fascist,” and once again a few years later when he rattled the military-industrial complex by daring to declare that “War is a racket.”
Ritter, too, took serious punishment from his critics – and instead of doing proper due diligence or asking hard questions, the media quickly piled on. It was not Fox’s finest hour when that network gleefully painted him as a 21st-century Benedict Arnold – not that he had many prime-time advocates anywhere else. Even CNN’s usually evenhanded Paula Zahn said to Ritter six months before America unleashed its miscalculated military solution on Iraq, “People out there are accusing you of drinking Saddam Hussein’s Kool-Aid.”
Eighteen months later, Ritter has not only survived the relentless ridicule and all the scurrilous attempts at character assassination, he’s clearly been vindicated. And by one David Kay, who dismissed Ritter’s prewar analysis with: “Either he lied to you then or he’s lying to you now. ... He’s gone completely the other way. I cannot explain it on the basis of known facts.”
Ritter doesn’t come close to buying Kay’s present-day convenient conclusion – now spun into a pre 2004-election pass-the-buck revisionist chant – that our $30 billion-a-year spook op goofed. Ritter says, “It’s the old story of people going-along-to-get-along who put their careers ahead of their country.”
Ritter doesn’t let President Bush off the hook, either: “He should rightly be held accountable for what increasingly appears to be deliberately misleading statements made by him and members of his administration regarding the threat posed by Iraq’s WMD.”
I asked Ritter if he felt totally exonerated. “I would feel a lot better if there were a way to reverse the hands of time,” he told me, “so that people would have paid more attention to what I said in the past, and we didn’t find ourselves caught up in this ongoing tragedy.”
What a shame that the president and his platoon of let’s-get-Saddam neocons, Congress and the CIA’s Tenet didn’t listen to the man-in-the-know when he cautioned: “U.S. and Iraqi casualties will be significant. ... We can’t go to war based on ignorance.”
But go to war we did. And now we’ve filled more than 530 body bags, medevaced thousands of soldiers, caused thousands more to be psychologically scarred, created tens of thousands of Iraqi casualties and stuck ourselves dead center in an ever-deepening tar pit.
For sure, people in high places need truth-tellers like Ritter to keep them straight. Had Bush talked to Ritter before opting for pre-emptive war, Bush might have been convinced to rearrange his options, and we might not be in this mess.
Evaluating intelligence calls for an open mind and sound judgment. Both were AWOL in our political leadership because of a preconceived agenda or an attack of yellow belly-itis that interfered with standing tall.
In either case, it’s time for a reckoning.
My recommendation: Put Ritter on the WMD intelligence probe. We can count on him to tell us the straight skinny, just as he tried to during the fevered, frenzied days of the dance to war.
The address of David Hackworth's home page is Hackworth.com. Sign in for the free weekly Defending America column at his Web site. Send mail to P.O. Box 11179, Greenwich, CT 06831. His newest book is “Steel My Soldiers’ Hearts.” © 2004 David H. Hackworth. |
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JerseyBluEyz
Joined: 09 Jul 2003
Posts: 1257
Location: Northeast |
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Thu Feb 12, 2004 6:50 am
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Ha! I would LOVE to see Ritter on CNN with King! Wouldn't that be a kicker? |
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Mech
Joined: 06 Jun 2001
Posts: 8237
Location: THE 4th REICH USA |
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Thu Feb 12, 2004 7:49 pm
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I wouldn't count on it anytime soon.
CNN would rather interview someone who will be a good little robot...like Barry McCaffrey or Ollie North.
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Boomer Chick
Joined: 01 Sep 2003
Posts: 407
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Fri Feb 13, 2004 2:59 am
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I'm glad somebody is writing about Ritter!
I followed him from day one! He and William Rivers Pitt (truthout.com) wrote a book together on Iraq and Ritter's writings were often posted there.
Yes, let's remember that Ritter was right all along like most of us against the war knew in our hearts!
Thanks, Mechie!
bc  |
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Mech
Joined: 06 Jun 2001
Posts: 8237
Location: THE 4th REICH USA |
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Mon Feb 16, 2004 3:43 pm
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February 15, 2004
WMD: A primer
http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/margolis_feb15.html
Let's be clear on what is - and isn't - a weapon of mass destruction
By ERIC MARGOLIS -- Contributing Foreign Editor
NEW YORK -- "Weapons of mass destruction." No term has been more abused, or less understood. George Bush has made it his personal mantra, and the slogan of his presidency.
An administration that may have concocted fake evidence to launch war on Iraq may yet conveniently "discover" unconventional weapons there - before November's U.S. elections. So let's define what such weapons are - and are not.
Three types of unconventional arms are called WMD: nuclear, chemical and biological.
Of those, the only true weapons of mass destruction are nuclear. The U.S., Russia, China, France, Britain, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea, alone possess them. Japan could make nuclear weapons within 90 days.
Without specialized medium and long-range delivery systems (aircraft or missiles), nuclear weapons are useless, even suicidal.
Last week, Bush warned of nuclear proliferation and called for a worldwide ban on the trade of nuclear material. This when U.S. ally Pakistan has been exposed as a major proliferator, Israel is covertly helping build India's nuclear capabilities and the U.S. plans to deploy a new generation of nuclear weapons designed to attack Third World targets.
Chemical weapons, which are not WMD, are blistering, choking, or toxic agents. Mustard gas possessed by Iraq, Libya, Syria, Egypt and other nations is World War I technology. Horrible as they are, these are strictly battlefield weapons, requiring large, clumsy holding tanks, and depend on favourable winds. Winston Churchill authorized using poison gas against "primitive tribesmen" - Kurds in Iraq and Afghans - when he was British home secretary. Benito Mussolini's Italy used mustard gas in Ethiopia and Libya.
Choking gas, like chlorine, is also a tactical battlefield agent. French troops without gas masks defending a 4-km front at Verdun in 1916 were hit by 60,000 chlorine gas shells, yet held their lines. So did Canadian troops in Flanders, also without masks, who heroically fought off superior German forces.
World War II vintage
Nerve gases, like Sarin and VX, are World War II vintage. Though deadly, they, too, are tactical agents designed for area denial and neutralizing high value targets. Using nerve gas requires specialized vehicles or aircraft with highly complex dispensing systems. Gas is dependent on temperature, humidity and wind. The Soviets tried various nerve agents in Afghanistan, but found them ineffective and dangerous to their own troops.
Nerve agents would be extremely lethal if released by terrorists in a large building, mall or airport but, again, they are weapons of localized destruction, not mass destruction. In 1995, a Japanese cult released nerve gas in Tokyo's subway, killing 12 people.
Nerve gas was not used during WW II because of its unreliability and lack of wide area lethality. Many gases are unstable and have limited shelf lives. Iraq and Iran used poison gas during the 1980-88 Gulf War - killing or maiming many soldiers but achieving no strategic breakthroughs.
Biological agents, like anthrax, botulism, Q-fever, tularemia and plague, are the most feared, yet least understood weapons. They are difficult to produce, store, transport and deliver. Germ weapons have never been successfully used in warfare. The USSR was secretly working on mutated, drug-resistant forms of anthrax and plague when it collapsed.
In the 1930s and '40s, Japan used anthrax in bombs, and also released plague-infected rats against Chinese civilian and military targets. These attempts produced some localized casualties. The Japanese military ruled their biological warfare campaign a failure.
Biowarfare agents are weapons of uncertain, limited destructiveness.
Conventional weapons can be as destructive as nuclear weapons. The two atomic bombs the U.S. dropped on Japan in 1945 killed 103,000 people. In one night alone, U.S. firebombs incinerated 100,000 civilians in Tokyo.
Japanese sources say one million civilians were killed by U.S. bombing raids. More than 100,000 German civilians were burned to death by the Allied fire-bombings of Dresden and Hamburg.
Fuel-air explosives, or thermobaric weapons, used by Russia in Chechnya and by the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq, can be as destructive as small, tactical nuclear weapons. So can America's recently deployed 21,500-lb. MOAB bomb. Larger versions are planned.
Given these facts, it's important to dissipate the hysteria and confusion over WMD. Even if Iraq had chemical or biological weapons in 1993 - which it did not - they were not true WMD. Iraq had no means of delivering them to the U.S., and they could never have posed the threat Bush claimed.
No terrorist group is likely to sneak enough chemical or biological material into the U.S. to cause more than localized damage. Attacks like those on the World Trade Center may be horrible, but they are not mass destruction. Even a small nuclear device would cause only limited destruction.
Ironically, the most lethal, yet most ignored, WMD faced by Americans happens to be their beloved cars, trucks and SUVs in which some 43,000 die each year in traffic accidents. |
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Boomer Chick
Joined: 01 Sep 2003
Posts: 407
Location: Colorado |
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Mon Feb 16, 2004 11:11 pm
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When Pat Buchanan even critcizes the neocons, well, it's mainstream criticism now!
Have the neocons killed a presidency?
Patrick J. Buchanan
Posted: February 16, 2004: (WorldNetDaily.com) George W. Bush "betrayed us," howled Al Gore.
"He played on our fear. He took America on an ill-conceived foreign adventure, dangerous to our troops, an adventure that was preordained and planned before 9-11 ever happened."
Hearing it, Gore's rant seemed slanderous and demagogic. For though U.S. policy since Clinton had called for regime change in Iraq, there is no evidence, none, that Bush planned to invade prior to 9-11.
Yet, the president has a grave problem, and it is this: Burrowed inside his foreign-policy team are men guilty of exactly what Gore accuses Bush of, men who did exploit our fears to stampede us into a war they had plotted for years. Consider:
In 1996, in a strategy paper crafted for Israel's Bibi Netanyahu, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser urged him to "focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power" as an "Israeli strategic objective." Perle, Feith, Wurmser were all on Bush's foreign policy team on 9-11.
In 1998, eight members of Bush's future team, including Perle, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, wrote Clinton urging upon him a strategy that "should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein."
On Jan. 1, 2001, nine months before 9-11, Wurmser called for U.S.-Israeli attacks "to broaden the [Middle East] conflict to strike fatally ... the regimes of Damascus, Baghdad, Tripoli, Teheran and Gaza ... to establish the recognition that fighting with either the United States or Israel is suicidal."
"Crises can be opportunities," added Wurmser.
On Sept. 11, opportunity struck.
On Sept. 15, according to author Bob Woodward, Paul Wolfowitz spoke up in the War Cabinet to urge that Afghanistan be put on a back burner and an attack be mounted at once on Iraq, though Iraq had had nothing to do with 9-11. Why Iraq? Said Wolfowitz, because it is "doable."
On Sept. 20, 40 neoconservatives in an open letter demanded that Bush remove Saddam from power, "even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the [9-11] attack." Failure to do so, they warned the president, "would constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism."
While Bush had taken office as a traditional conservative skeptical of "nation-building" and calling for a more "humble" foreign policy, after 9-11, he was captured by the neocons and converted to an agenda they had worked up years before. Suddenly, he sounded just like them, threatening wars on "axis-of-evil" nations that had nothing to do with 9-11.
And here is where Bush's present crisis was created.
Though he had internalized the neoconservative agenda for war, he had no rationale, no justification, no casus belli. Iraq had not threatened or attacked us.
Enter the WMD. Neoconservatives pressed on Bush the idea that Iraq must still have weapons of mass destruction and must be working on nuclear weapons. And as Saddam was a figure of such irrationality – i.e., a madman – he would readily give an atom bomb to al-Qaida. An American city could be incinerated.
Therefore, Saddam had to be destroyed. Bush bought it.
The problem, however, was this: While there is much evidence Saddam is evil, there is no evidence he was insane. He had not used his WMD in 1991, when he had them. For he was not a fool. He knew that would mean his end. Why would he then build a horror weapon now, give it to a terrorist and risk the annihilation of his regime, family, legacy and himself, a fate he had narrowly escaped in 1991?
Made no sense – and there was no hard evidence on the WMD.
Thus, when the CIA was unable to come up with hard evidence that Saddam still had WMD, or was building nuclear weapons, neocon insiders sifted the intelligence, cherry-picked it, presented tidbits to the media as unvarnished truth, and persuaded Powell and the president to rely on it to make the case to Congress, the country and the world. Powell and the president did.
Now the WMD case has fallen apart. Powell has egg on his face. And the president must persuade Tim Russert and the nation that Iraq was a "war of necessity" because we "had no choice when we looked at the intelligence I looked at."
But, sir, the intelligence you "looked at" was flawed. Who gave it to you?
To its neocon architects, Iraq was always about empire, hegemony, Pax Americana, global democracy – about getting hold of America's power to make the Middle East safe for Sharon and themselves glorious and famous.
But now they have led a president who came to office with good intentions and a good heart to the precipice of ruin. One wonders if Bush knows how badly he has been had. And if he does, why he has not summarily dealt with those who misled him?
© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com, Inc. http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=37139
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But notice, there's no mention of oil? The quest for oil resources as the world has hit "peak oil" is the underlying reason for hegemony and so-called democratization! Our Western way of life, based on petroleum products should have accomodated and transitioned to alternative viable energy resources and substitutes for petroleum based products in plastics, fertilizers, and pesticides a LOOOOOOOONG time ago -- 30 years. Maybe then there could be a hope -- but now, it's downhill from here and the wars over oil will continue until either natural disasters or destructive weaponry destroys the insfrastructure we do have. We're going down -- and very few of us know it. It is too late according to many scientists.
______________________________
Life After The Oil Crash
By Matthew David Savinar
2-11-4
Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon. This is not the
wacky conclusion of a religious cult, but rather the result of
diligent analysis sourced by hard data and the scientists who study
global "Peak Oil" and related geo-political events.
So who are these nay-sayers who claim the sky is falling? Conspiracy
fanatics? Apocalypse Bible prophesy readers? To the contrary, they
are some of the most respected, highest paid geologists and experts in
the world. And this is what's so scary.
The situation is so dire that even George W. Bush's Energy Adviser,
Matthew Simmons, has acknowledged that "The situation is desperate.
This is the world's biggest serious question."
According to Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham, "America faces a
major energy supply crisis over the next two decades. The failure to
meet this challenge will threaten our nation's economic prosperity,
compromise our national security, and literally alter the way we lead
our lives."
If you are like 99% of the people reading this letter, you have never
heard of the term "Peak Oil". I had not heard the term until a few
months ago. Since learning about Peak Oil, I have had my world view,
and basic assumptions about my own individual future turned completely
upside down.
A little about myself: A few months ago, I was a 25 year old law
school graduate who found out he had just passed the California Bar
Exam. I was excited about a potentially long and prosperous career
in the legal profession, getting married, having kids, contributing to
my community, and living the "American Dream."
Peak Oil has caused me to seriously question how realistic this vision
of my life is.
Whether you're 25 or 75, an attorney or an auto mechanic, what you are
about to read will shake the foundations of your life.
Below you find a brief explanation of Peak Oil, the ramifications, and
what we can do about it. For the sake of simplicity, I have designed
the following explanation for somebody unfamiliar with Peak Oil. If
you would like more in depth explanations with graphs, charts, and the
like, please consult the extensive interviews, articles and sites I
have linked to throughout this site.
What is "Peak Oil"?
All oil production follows a bell curve, whether in an individual
field or on the planet as a whole. On the upslope of the curve
production costs are significantly lower than on the downslope when
extra effort (expense) is required to extract oil from reservoirs that
are emptying out.
Put simply: oil is abundant and cheap on the upslope, scarce and
expensive on the downslope.
For the past 150 years, we have been moving up the upslope of the
global oil production curve. "Peak Oil" is the industry term for the
top of the curve. It's often referred to as "Hubbert's Peak" a
reference to King Hubbert, the geologist who discovered that oil
production follows a bell curve.
Once we pass the peak, we will go down the very steep downslope. The
further we go down the slope, the more it costs to produce oil, and
its cousin, natural gas.
In practical terms, this means that if 2000 was the year of Peak Oil,
worldwide oil production in the year 2020 will be the same as it was
in 1980. However, the world's population in 2020 will be both much
larger (appoximately twice as big) and much more industrialized than
it was in 1980. Consequently, worldwide demand for oil will outpace
the worldwide production of oil by a significant margin.
The more demand for oil exceeds production of oil, the higher the
price goes.
Ultimately, the question is not "When will we run out of oil?" but
rather, "When will we run out of cheap oil?"
Read the entire story here: http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/Index.html
-----------------------
Just a matter of time.
WMD is just a cover story for our dependence on oil.
bc
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