posted 01-08-2004 08:37 PM            

Carnegie group says Bush made wrong claims on WMD

Julian Borger in Washington
Thursday January 8, 2004
The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1118424,00.html

The Bush administration will today be accused of "systematically misrepresenting" the threat posed by "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction" in a comprehensive report on post-war findings.

posted 01-26-2004 07:46 AM            

IRAQ WAS NOT A THREAT TO THE U.S.

END OF STORY

LET THE CHIPS FALL WHERE THEY MAY

******

Saddam's WMD never existed, says chief American arms inspector David Kay

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=484185

By Andrew Buncombe in Washington

24 January 2004

David Kay, who stood down yesterday as head of the Bush administration's hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, said that he did not believe that any stockpiles of such weapons ever existed.

Mr Kay, a former UN inspector, said that most of what was going to be found in the hunt for Saddam Hussein's WMD had already been uncovered. The returning of sovereignty to the Iraqis would make the search more difficult, he added. "I don't think they existed," Mr Kay said, referring to Saddam's alleged stockpiles of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the [1991] Gulf War and I don't think there was a large-scale production programme in the Nineties."

Mr Kay's comments will be an embarrassment for the Bush administration. Earlier this week the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, one of Washington's most outspoken hawks who led the rallying cry for war insisting that Saddam possessed WMD, said the outcome of the search was not clear. "I think the jury is still out," he said. "It's going to take ... time to look in all of the cubby holes and ammo dumps in Iraq."

Despite having the resources of more than 1,000 personnel dedicated to the hunt for such weapons, an interim report issued by Mr Kay in October conceded that no weapons had been found, even though there was evidence Iraq had retained the "template" of a weapons programme.

The Bush administration appears determined to continue its public stance that such weapons could be discovered.

Donald Anderson, the Labour chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, said that Mr Kay's comments posed serious problems for British and American intelligence agencies. "My understanding is that the President and the Prime Minister were acting on intelligence then available [at the time of deciding to go to war]. So this raises very important questions about the quality of that intelligence," he told BBC's Newsnight.

A Downing Street spokesman said: "It is important that people are patient and we let the Iraq Survey Group do its work. Their work is continuing and we should await the outcome of that. Our position is unchanged."

Today the former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said that Mr Blair must now admit that the Iraq war was a mistake.

Mr Cook said he believed Mr Blair led Britain into the conflict in order to demonstrate to US President George Bush that he was a reliable ally and had been driven by "missionary zeal" and "evangelical certainty".

Mr Cook said on BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "It is becoming really rather undignified for the Prime Minister to continue to insist that he was right all along when everybody can now see he was wrong, when even the head of the Iraq Survey Group has said he was wrong.

"I think it is very important that Tony Blair does concede that there were mistakes made, maybe in all good faith, probably he believed them genuinely, but there were mistakes. Because if we don't face up to the fact that we got it wrong, then we are not going to learn the lessons.

posted 01-27-2004 01:16 PM            

Baghdad is Bush's blue dress
Robert Scheer - Creators Syndicate

01.27.04 - Now, can we talk of impeachment? The rueful admission by former chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction or the means to create them at the time of the U.S. invasion confirms the fact that the Bush administration is complicit in arguably the greatest scandal in U.S. history. It's only because the Republicans control both houses of Congress that we hear no calls for a broad-ranging investigation of the type that led to the discovery of Monica Lewinsky's infamous blue dress.

In no previous instance of presidential malfeasance was so much at stake, both in preserving constitutional safeguards and national security. This egregious deception in leading us to war on phony intelligence overshadows those scandals based on greed, such as Teapot Dome during the Harding administration, or those aimed at political opponents, such as Watergate. And the White House continues to dig itself deeper into a hole by denying reality even as its lieutenants one by one find the courage to speak the truth.

A year after using his 2003 State of the Union address to paint Iraq's allegedly vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction as a grave threat to the U.S. and the world, Bush spent this month's State of the Union defending the war because "had we failed to act, the dictator's weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day." Bush said officials were still "seeking all the facts" about Iraq's weapons programs but noted that weapons searchers had already identified "dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."

Vice President Dick Cheney, in interviews with USA Today and the Los Angeles Times, echoed this fudging -- last year's "weapons" are now called "programs" -- declaring that "the jury's still out" on whether Iraq had WMDs and, "I am a long way at this stage from concluding that somehow there was some fundamental flaw in our intelligence."

Yet three days after the State of the Union address, Kay quit and then began telling the world what the administration had denied since taking over the White House: That Hussein's regime was but a weak shadow of the military force it had been at the time of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, that he believed it had no significant chemical, biological or nuclear weapons programs or stockpiles in place, and that the United Nations inspections and allied bombing in the '90s had been more effective at eroding the remnants of these programs than critics had thought.

"I'm personally convinced that there were not large stockpiles of newly produced weapons of mass destruction," Kay told the New York Times. "We don't find the people, the documents or the physical plants that you would expect to find if the production was going on. I think they gradually reduced stockpiles throughout the 1990s. Somewhere in the mid-1990s the large chemical overhang of existing stockpiles was eliminated. ... The Iraqis say they believed that [the U.N. inspection program] was more effective [than U.S. analysts believed], and they didn't want to get caught."

The maddening aspect of all this is that we haven't needed Kay to set the record straight. The administration's systematic abuse of the facts, including the fraudulent link of Hussein to 9/11, has been obvious for two years. That's why 23 former U.S. intelligence experts -- including several who quit in disgust -- have been willing to speak out in Robert Greenwald's shocking documentary "Uncovered." The story they tell is one of an administration that went to war for reasons that smack of empire-building, then constructed a false reality to sell it to the American people. Is that not an impeachable offense?

After all, the president misled Congress into approving his preemptive war on the grounds that our very survival as a nation was threatened by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. We were told that if we hesitated, allowing the U.N. inspectors who were in Iraq to keep working, a mushroom cloud over New York, to use Condoleezza Rice's imagery, might well be our dark reward.

Now that Kay -- who, it should be remembered, once defended the war and dismissed the work of the U.N. inspectors -- has had $900 million and at least 1,200 weapons inspectors to discover what many in the CIA and elsewhere had been telling us all along, are there to be no real repercussions for such devastating official deceit?

posted 01-27-2004 05:05 PM            

David Kay's remarks over the weekend—that Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction before the war and that U.S. intelligence agencies missed the signs that would have told them as much—held few surprises for anyone who'd closely read his official report on the matter last October. (Click here for one such close reading.)

Kay was the CIA's chief weapons inspector until he resigned last week. The difference between his report of last fall and his statements of recent days is that he was still on the Bush administration's payroll when he wrote the former and a free agent when he made the latter. It's the difference between obfuscation and clarity—political allegiance and public candor.

The discrepancy is not so much a comment on David Kay or George W. Bush as a general caution on how to read official reports.

For example, in an interview conducted late Saturday and published in today's New York Times, Kay says, "I'm personally convinced that there were not large stockpiles of newly produced weapons of mass destruction. We don't find the people, the documents or the physical plants that you would expect to find if the production was going on."

Iraq's weapons and facilities, he says, had been destroyed in three phases: by allied bombardment in the 1991 Gulf War; by U.N. inspectors in the half-decade after that war; and by President Clinton's 1998 bombing campaign. (Clinton's airstrikes, by now widely forgotten, were even at the time widely dismissed as a political diversion; they took place during the weekend when the House of Representatives voted for impeachment. But according to Kay, they destroyed Iraq's remaining infrastructure for building chemical weapons.) Kay adds that Saddam tried to resuscitate some of these programs, but—due to sanctions, fear of inspections, and lack of resources—he was not able to do so.

Kay made these same points in his report last October, but it was easy to overlook them—in fact, the reader was meant to. Kay didn't exactly lie in the report; the points were there if you looked carefully; but he did his best to camouflage them.

There are tried and true methods to this art of camouflage. The idea is to deploy vague rhetoric and unchallengeable facts that seem menacing at first glance but on close inspection have no significance. The hope is that, if you play this game well enough, nobody will inspect them closely enough to notice.

For instance, Kay began his report by noting that Saddam Hussein's WMD program "spanned more than two decades" and "involved thousands of people and billions of dollars."

You had to read the next several pages to realize that these thousands of people and billions of dollars also "spanned more than two decades"—that, at least since 1991, nowhere near that much money or manpower was involved at any one time. You also have to read on to realize that, whatever the level of endeavor, its results were nil. In short, Kay wasn't lying. But he was setting a diversionary tone, at the top of the report, to please his bosses and give them ammo for sound bites.

Another example: Kay wrote, in a breathless style, that Saddam had set up "a clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service." Buried in the paragraphs to follow was Kay's conclusion that these labs and safehouses didn't produce anything of note. Similarly, the report warned that Saddam "may have engaged" in "research on a possible VX-stabilizer" (italics added), but said nothing about whether he actually developed any such thing or even possessed VX.

My favorite example of Kay's attempt to trump substance with style: Saddam's scientists "began several small and relatively unsophisticated research initiatives … that could have been useful in developing a weapons-relevant science base for the long-term." This description is so vague, it would accurately describe the act of reading a textbook on nuclear physics.

Kay did his job well. His report did not tell lies. But it puffed up enough smoke to let President Bush proclaim it as a justification for the war. Bush cited, with particular enthusiasm, the bit about Saddam's "clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses"—a phrase containing four words designed to raise the hair of anyone who's ever glanced at a spy novel.

Now that Kay has quit, he can tell the same story—but without the smokescreen.

In the Times interview, Kay does add one dimension to his tale—and it is the newest, most intriguing aspect of them all. In the late 1990s, it seems, Saddam took personal control of Iraq's WMD program. As a result, Iraqi scientists started going to him directly with proposals of fanciful weapons systems, for which Saddam paid them heaps of money. As Kay puts it, the WMD program turned into a "vortex of corruption." Saddam was deluded with fantasies; the scientists pocketed the money and filed phony progress reports on fake weapons systems.

Kay says the CIA's biggest failure lay in missing this internal deception. Though the Times piece doesn't say so, it's quite likely that the CIA itself was deceived, intercepting some of these phony reports and treating them as credulously as Saddam did. In any case, in the Times interview, Kay calls for an overhaul in the way the agency processes intelligence.

It is significant that Kay wrote nothing about the Iraqi scientists' deception campaign—and issued no such call for radical reform of the U.S. intelligence community—in his report last October. The omissions are the ultimate indicators that the report's main goal was to please and protect his employer.

Even now, Kay falls short of making a full break with the Bush administration. He continues to state that Iraq was a danger to the world, worth going to war against, even if not for the same reasons that Bush claimed. He tells the Times, "We know that terrorists were passing through Iraq. And now we know that there was little control over Iraq's weapons capabilities. I think it shows that Iraq was a very dangerous place. The country had the technology, the ability to produce, and there were terrorist groups passing through the country—and no central control."

This is a puzzling sequence of non sequiturs. Terrorists may have been passing through, but Kay—who bases his other conclusions on interviews with many Iraqi scientists and examination of many documents—found nothing that suggests any contact between terrorists and scientists. The disarray of Saddam's rule may have meant there was "little control over Iraq's weapons capabilities," but, as Kay says elsewhere, there was also little in the way of Iraqi weapons. Having "the technology" is not the same thing as having the weapons; "the ability to produce" is not the same thing as producing.

It will be interesting to watch where David Kay goes next. On one level, he's come clean, but on another, he's still playing his old games.

Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate.

posted 02-05-2004 08:56 AM            

And those of you who sold your better judgment for a free hot-dog and a flag at a Clear Channel sponsored pro-Bush rally, well, you were lied to as well, and worse, made to look totally stupid before the rest of the world. The media which walked right past peace demonstrations to video tape the Clear Channel party plastered your face across the TV sets of the planet, waving your flag and shouting "Sig WMD! Sig WMD" and singing "Dubya Dubya Uber Alles" or something to that effect. And here you stand now, with egg on your collective faces, finally facing up to what your more intelligent neighbors knew all along; There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Bush made a total fool of you. The whole world is laughing at you. Those lacking the courage to admit they were wrong will no doubt descend into the ranks of fanatical "true believers", ready to drink the Kool-Aid for his highnessness der Dubyer. For the rest of you brave enough to admit you were fooled, are you angry yet?

And for you Congressional types reading this web site (and I know that many of you do), Bush made total jackasses out of you as well. Under the Constitution, which you are sworn to uphold, only Congress can declare war. Changing the name to "police action" or "battle" does not get you off of the hook. When our army marches into another nation to take it over, that's a war by any meaningful definition of the word. So, you passed a bill that authorized the President to send in the military to Iraq, but ONLY if the President could prove that Saddam was hiding weapons of mass destruction in defiance of UN Resolution 1441. The President said he had proof, and you did not check him on it. And now that the world knows that the President did not actually have any such proof, the world knows that the US Congress failed in their job. You were had, used, swindled, conned, etc. Bush bypassed you. He got his illegal war right past you. The President has made the entire Congress look like weak and impotent idiots and fools before the rest of the world for not exercising due diligence over a serious matter like war. Are you angry yet?

Our media has tried to teach us all that hate and anger are bad. Anger must be "managed". Hate of any and all kinds must be suppressed. Well, I am here to tell you that certain hates and angers are not only justified, they are essential. I hate drug dealers, don't you? I hate liars, don't you? You're a sucker if you don't. I hate spies who use deception to trick our nation into doing things it ought not to be doing. Hate and anger helped drive the British out of the colonies 1776. Hate and anger fueled the victory of WW2, which is why Bush, with his lies, tried to trick us all (or at least the gullible ones) into hating and being angry at a designated target for invasion.

I am very angry. #$%^#%$ anger management, I am pissed off! And if you carry any of the blood of those who made this nation what it is today you have to be angry too. You should be angry. You must be angry. Because right now there is a battle about to start over whether this nation will continue to be ruled by those who lie, or whether the liars will be kicked out. Whether we will have honest government or not. Whether we will be slaves to liars, or free citizens with honorable and respectful and fair government.

posted 02-05-2004 09:12 AM            

Julian Borger reports on the shadow rightwing intelligence network set up in Washington to second-guess the CIA and deliver a justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force

Thursday July 17, 2003: (The Guardian) As the CIA director, George Tenet, arrived at the Senate yesterday to give secret testimony on the Niger uranium affair, it was becoming increasingly clear in Washington that the scandal was only a small, well-documented symptom of a complete breakdown in US intelligence that helped steer America into war.

It represents the Bush administration's second catastrophic intelligence failure. But the CIA and FBI's inability to prevent the September 11 attacks was largely due to internal institutional weaknesses.

This time the implications are far more damaging for the White House, which stands accused of politicising and contaminating its own source of intelligence.

According to former Bush officials, all defence and intelligence sources, senior administration figures created a shadow agency of Pentagon analysts staffed mainly by ideological amateurs to compete with the CIA and its military counterpart, the Defence Intelligence Agency.

The agency, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), was set up by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to second-guess CIA information and operated under the patronage of hardline conservatives in the top rungs of the administration, the Pentagon and at the White House, including Vice-President Dick Cheney.

The ideologically driven network functioned like a shadow government, much of it off the official payroll and beyond congressional oversight. But it proved powerful enough to prevail in a struggle with the State Department and the CIA by establishing a justification for war.

Mr Tenet has officially taken responsibility for the president's unsubstantiated claim in January that Saddam Hussein's regime had been trying to buy uranium in Africa, but he also said his agency was under pressure to justify a war that the administration had already decided on.

How much Mr Tenet reveals of where that pressure was coming from could have lasting political fallout for Mr Bush and his re-election prospects, which only a few weeks ago seemed impregnable. As more Americans die in Iraq and the reasons for the war are revealed, his victory in 2004 no longer looks like a foregone conclusion.

The White House counter-attacked yesterday when new chief spokesman, Scott McClellan, accused critics of "politicising the war" and trying to "rewrite history". But the Democratic leadership kept up its questions over the White House role.

The president's most trusted adviser, Mr Cheney, was at the shadow network's sharp end. He made several trips to the CIA in Langley, Virginia, to demand a more "forward-leaning" interpretation of the threat posed by Saddam. When he was not there to make his influence felt, his chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was. Such hands-on involvement in the processing of intelligence data was unprecedented for a vice-president in recent times, and it put pressure on CIA officials to come up with the appropriate results.

Another frequent visitor was Newt Gingrich, the former Republican party leader who resurfaced after September 11 as a Pentagon "consultant" and a member of its unpaid defence advisory board, with influence far beyond his official title.

An intelligence official confirmed Mr Gingrich made "a couple of visits" but said there was nothing unusual about that.

Rick Tyler, Mr Gingrich's spokesman, said: "If he was at the CIA he was there to listen and learn, not to persuade or influence."

Mr Gingrich visited Langley three times before the war, and according to accounts, the political veteran sought to browbeat analysts into toughening up their assessments of Saddam's menace.

Mr Gingrich gained access to the CIA headquarters and was listened to because he was seen as a personal emissary of the Pentagon and, in particular, of the OSP.

In the days after September 11, Mr Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, mounted an attempt to include Iraq in the war against terror. When the established agencies came up with nothing concrete to link Iraq and al-Qaida, the OSP was given the task of looking more carefully.

William Luti, a former navy officer and ex-aide to Mr Cheney, runs the day-to-day operations, answering to Douglas Feith, a defence undersecretary and a former Reagan official.

The OSP had access to a huge amount of raw intelligence. It came in part from "report officers" in the CIA's directorate of operations whose job is to sift through reports from agents around the world, filtering out the unsubstantiated and the incredible. Under pressure from the hawks such as Mr Cheney and Mr Gingrich, those officers became reluctant to discard anything, no matter how far-fetched. The OSP also sucked in countless tips from the Iraqi National Congress and other opposition groups, which were viewed with far more scepticism by the CIA and the state department.

There was a mountain of documentation to look through and not much time. The administration wanted to use the momentum gained in Afghanistan to deal with Iraq once and for all. The OSP itself had less than 10 full-time staff, so to help deal with the load, the office hired scores of temporary "consultants". They included lawyers, congressional staffers, and policy wonks from the numerous rightwing thinktanks in Washington. Few had experience in intelligence.

"Most of the people they had in that office were off the books, on personal services contracts. At one time, there were over 100 of them," said an intelligence source. The contracts allow a department to hire individuals, without specifying a job description.

As John Pike, a defence analyst at the thinktank GlobalSecurity.org, put it, the contracts "are basically a way they could pack the room with their little friends".

"They surveyed data and picked out what they liked," said Gregory Thielmann, a senior official in the state department's intelligence bureau until his retirement in September. "The whole thing was bizarre. The secretary of defence had this huge defence intelligence agency, and he went around it."

In fact, the OSP's activities were a com plete mystery to the DIA and the Pentagon.

"The iceberg analogy is a good one," said a senior officer who left the Pentagon during the planning of the Iraq war. "No one from the military staff heard, saw or discussed anything with them."

The civilian agencies had the same impression of the OSP sleuths. "They were a pretty shadowy presence," Mr Thielmann said. "Normally when you compile an intelligence document, all the agencies get together to discuss it. The OSP was never present at any of the meetings I attended."

Democratic congressman David Obey, who is investigating the OSP, said: "That office was charged with collecting, vetting and disseminating intelligence completely outside of the normal intelligence apparatus. In fact, it appears that information collected by this office was in some instances not even shared with established intelligence agencies and in numerous instances was passed on to the national security council and the president without having been vetted with anyone other than political appointees."

The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.

"None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels," said one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they were waved in on Mr Feith's authority without having to fill in the usual forms.

The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship Mr Feith and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel's Likud party.

In 1996, he and Richard Perle - now an influential Pentagon figure - served as advisers to the then Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu. In a policy paper they wrote, entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, the two advisers said that Saddam would have to be destroyed, and Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran would have to be overthrown or destabilised, for Israel to be truly safe.

The Israeli influence was revealed most clearly by a story floated by unnamed senior US officials in the American press, suggesting the reason that no banned weapons had been found in Iraq was that they had been smuggled into Syria. Intelligence sources say that the story came from the office of the Israeli prime minister.

The OSP absorbed this heady brew of raw intelligence, rumour and plain disinformation and made it a "product", a prodigious stream of reports with a guaranteed readership in the White House. The primary customers were Mr Cheney, Mr Libby and their closest ideological ally on the national security council, Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice's deputy.

In turn, they leaked some of the claims to the press, and used others as a stick with which to beat the CIA and the state department analysts, demanding they investigate the OSP leads.

The big question looming over Congress as Mr Tenet walked into his closed-door session yesterday was whether this shadow intelligence operation would survive national scrutiny and who would pay the price for allowing it to help steer the country into war.

A former senior CIA official insisted yesterday that Mr Feith, at least, was "finished" - but that may be wishful thinking by a rival organisation.

posted 02-05-2004 11:29 AM            

**

Bush: Arms 'We Thought' Were in Iraq Are Not Found

11 minutes ago

A

CHARLESTON, S.C. (Reuters) - President Bush acknowledged on Thursday that the United States had not found banned weapons "we thought" were in Iraq , but defended the war as "the right thing" to do.

GOOD...THAT MEANS YOU SHOULD BE IMPEACHED FOR LYING.

"We have not yet found the stockpiles of weapons that we thought were there," Bush said in a speech at the port of Charleston, South Carolina, in his clearest acknowledgment of problems with prewar intelligence on Iraqi weapons.

However, he said, "Knowing what I knew then and knowing what I know today, America did the right thing in Iraq."

YOU LIED TO GO TO WAR. YOU AREN'T FOOLING ANYONE.

Bush spoke shortly after CIA director George Tenet defended his agency's work despite prewar intelligence that inaccurately accused ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein of maintaining stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and seeking to develop nuclear weapons.

Those accusations were at the heart of Bush's case for going to war. Tenet said in a Washington speech that the intelligence community was neither "completely right nor completely wrong" about Iraq, and said analysts "never said there was an imminent threat."

NEVER AN IMMINENT THREAT...DUH!!!

WE ALREDY KNEW THIS...BUT WE WENT TO WAR ANYWAY.

Bush and other administration officials did say Iraq presented a grave and "gathering" threat.

But Bush said on Thursday he acted properly. "We had a choice -- either take the word of a madman or take action to defend the American people. Faced with that choice I will defend America every time."

SADDAM WAS NOT A THREAT. WHERE ARE THE WEAPONS? NOW YOU HAVE 600 AMERICANS AND
THOUSANDS OF IRAQIS DEAD.

Bush's speech to military personnel and others, in South Carolina, a state that had been crawling with Democratic presidential candidates ahead of last Tuesday's primary, was heavily laced with reelection campaign themes of the economy and national security.

He blasted critics of the war, saying, "If some politicians in Washington had their way, Saddam Hussein would still be in power."

SADDAM WAS NEVER A THREAT TO THE US...BUT HE
HAD LOTS OF OIL.

posted 02-05-2004 04:17 PM            

BRITISH AND US SPYS READY TO BLAME EACH OTHER
05.02.2004
By ROBERT VERKAIK in London

The special relationship between Britain and America will be severely tested as both countries embark on inquiries that are set to blame each other for the intelligence failure over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Britain is expected to draw first blood when the inquiry headed by former Cabinet secretary Lord Butler reports in the next few months.

George W. Bush - quite deliberately - will have to wait until after this year's US election before he gets his response.

In the meantime, America's intelligence community will be trying to pre-empt Lord Butler's findings by briefing both countries' media on flaws or shortcomings in Britain's intelligence-gathering operation .

Last year's transatlantic intelligence tiff over MI6's claim that Saddam had cultivated contacts with Niger may be a taster of what is to come. In the end it forced Bush into an embarrassing climbdown and the admission that they had been over-reliant on British intelligence. The fall-out left MI6 and CIA on bad terms.

But the central issue for both inquiries will be whose intelligence formed the basis of the flawed assessment of Saddam's weapons haul.

In other words, who followed whom? For once Britain's reliance on American intelligence might turn out to be a blessing in disguise.

If Blair can show that the false war prospectus was based on American intelligence failures he may well escape some of the political damage from his own inquiry.

posted 02-05-2004 04:21 PM            

Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons. George W. Bush, President Speech to UN General Assembly 9/12/2002

Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is rebuilding the facilities used to make more of those weapons. We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have. George W. Bush, President Radio Address 10/5/2002

The Iraqi regime . . . possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas. George W. Bush, President Cincinnati, Ohio Speech 10/7/2002

And surveillance photos reveal that the regime is rebuilding facilities that it had used to produce chemical and biological weapons. George W. Bush, President Cincinnati, Ohio Speech 10/7/2002

After eleven years during which we have tried containment, sanctions, inspections, even selected military action, the end result is that Saddam Hussein still has chemical and biological weapons and is increasing his capabilities to make more. And he is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon. George W. Bush, President Cincinnati, Ohio Speech 10/7/2002

We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. George W. Bush, President Cincinnati, Ohio Speech 10/7/2002

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. George W. Bush, President State of the Union Address 1/28/2003

Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent. George W. Bush, President State of the Union Address 1/28/2003

We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have. George W. Bush, President Radio Address 2/8/2003

In Iraq, a dictator is building and hiding weapons that could enable him to dominate the Middle East and intimidate the civilized world -- and we will not allow it. George W. Bush, President Speech to the American Enterprise Institute 2/26/2003

posted 02-05-2004 04:28 PM            

Anyone with half a brain would understand the REAL reasons why we wnt to war and they had NOTHING to do with WMD or "terrorism" for that matter.

These sick bastards running our government will INTENTIONALLY let this investigation DRAG ON...much like...

* The investigation of the "outed" CIA officer

* The REAL investigation of what really happened on Sept. 11th

Its almost time to SECCEDE FROM THE UNION, OUR FEDERAL GOVERNMENT GOVERNMENT DOES NOT WORK FOR US ANYMORE...THEY WORK FOR THE GLOBALISTS.

QUOTE: George W. Bush - quite deliberately - will have to wait until after this year's US election before he gets his response.

posted 02-06-2004 08:17 PM            

SHUT UP!!! WE NEVER SAID THAT SADDAM HAD WMD!!!!!!

I wonder WHO is going to be the fall guy/patsy for the Bush administration?

posted 02-07-2004 12:23 PM            

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.

posted 02-08-2004 09:19 PM            

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.

posted 02-09-2004 02:05 AM            

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.

posted 02-09-2004 02:19 AM            

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

posted 02-09-2004 10:57 AM            

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.

posted 02-10-2004 10:06 AM            

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 Ass