posted 07-07-2003 01:14 AM            

A growing number of U.S. national security professionals are accusing the Bush administration of slanting the facts and hijacking the $30 billion intelligence apparatus to justify its rush to war in Iraq.

A key target is a four-person Pentagon team that reviewed material gathered by other intelligence outfits for any missed bits that might have tied Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to banned weapons or terrorist groups.

This team, self-mockingly called the Cabal, "cherry-picked the intelligence stream" in a bid to portray Iraq as an imminent threat, said Patrick Lang, a former head of worldwide human intelligence gathering for the Defense Intelligence Agency, which coordinates military intelligence.

The DIA was "exploited and abused and bypassed in the process of making the case for war in Iraq based on the presence of WMD," or weapons of mass destruction, he added in a phone interview. He said the CIA had "no guts at all" to resist the allegedly deliberate skewing of intelligence by a Pentagon that he said was now dominating U.S. foreign policy.

Vince Cannistraro, a former chief of Central Intelligence Agency counterterrorist operations, said he knew of serving intelligence officers who blame the Pentagon for playing up "fraudulent" intelligence, "a lot of it sourced from the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi."

The INC, which brought together groups opposed to Saddam, worked closely with the Pentagon to build a for the early use of force in Iraq.

"There are current intelligence officials who believe it is a scandal," he said in a telephone interview. They believe the administration, before going to war, had a "moral obligation to use the best information available, not just information that fits your preconceived ideas."

CHEMICAL WEAPONS REPORT 'SIMPLY WRONG'

The top Marine Corps officer in Iraq, Lt. Gen. James Conway, said on Friday U.S. intelligence was "simply wrong" in leading military commanders to fear troops were likely to be attacked with chemical weapons in the March invasion of Iraq that ousted Saddam.

Richard Perle, a Chalabi backer and member of the Defense Policy Board that advises Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, defended the four-person unit in a television interview.

"They established beyond any doubt that there were connections that had gone unnoticed in previous intelligence analysis," he said on the PBS NewsHour Thursday.

A Pentagon spokesman, Marine Lt. Col. David Lapan, said the team in question analyzed links among terrorist groups and alleged state sponsors and shared conclusions with the CIA.

"In one case, a briefing was presented to Director of Central Intelligence Tenet. It dealt with the links between Iraq and al Qaeda," the group blamed for the Sept. 2001 attacks on the United States, he said.

Tenet denied charges the intelligence community, on which the United States spends more than $30 billion a year, had skewed its analysis to fit a political agenda, a cardinal sin for professionals meant to tell the truth regardless of politics.

"I'm enormously proud of the work of our analysts," he said in a statement on Friday ahead of an internal review. "The integrity of our process has been maintained throughout and any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong."

Tenet sat conspicuously behind Secretary of State Colin Powell during a key Feb. 5 presentation to the U.N. Security Council arguing Iraq represented an ominous and urgent threat -- as if to lend the CIA's credibility to the presentation, replete with satellite photos.

Powell said Friday his presentation was "the best analytic product that we could have put up."

SHAPED 'FROM THE TOP DOWN'

Greg Thielmann, who retired in September after 25 years in the State Department, the last four in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research working on weapons, said it appeared to him that intelligence had been shaped "from the top down."

"The normal processing of establishing accurate intelligence was sidestepped" in the runup to invading Iraq, said David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector who is president of the Institute for Science and International Security and who deals with U.S. intelligence officers.

Anger among security professionals appears widespread. Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group that says it is made up mostly of CIA intelligence analysts, wrote to U.S. President George Bush May 1 to hit what they called "a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions."

"In intelligence there is one unpardonable sin -- cooking intelligence to the recipe of high policy," it wrote. "There is ample indication this has been done with respect to Iraq."

Source: Reuters.

posted 07-07-2003 01:25 AM            

Weaponsgate: The coming downfall of lying regimes

By Wayne Madsen Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative reporter. He was also the Operations Officer at Naval Facility Coos Head, Oregon from 1980 to 1982 and assisted the FBI and NIS in the investigation as a temporary special agent.

June 13, 2003 - You wouldn't know it from listening to the leading Democratic candidates for president, but "Weaponsgate" may ultimately bring about the downfall of the Bush regime and its allies in London, Canberra, and elsewhere. The neoconservatives may have also finally stirred something in the Fourth Estate, which has suddenly begun challenging the lying echo chambers in the White House and 10 Downing Street.

The arrogance displayed by the Bush regime, somewhat surprising since it gained power through a fraudulent election process, is what may result in its eventual undoing. Bush may or may not ever realize how he was ill served by the neocon blight that took root within his administration, particularly within the Department of Defense. But the historians and scholars, who will look back on what turned the tide for a supposedly "popular" war president, will point to the self- described "cabal" whose lies brought about a credibility gap unseen in the United States since the days of Watergate.

In fact, Bush's "Weaponsgate" will be viewed as a more serious than Watergate because 1) U.S. and allied military personnel were killed and injured as a result of the caper; 2) Innocent Iraqi civilians, including women and children, died in a needless military adventure; and 3) the political effects of the scandal extended far beyond U.S. shores to the United Kingdom, Australia, Spain, and other countries.

Other effects of Weaponsgate are already apparent. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the majordomo of the neocons within the Pentagon, cannot find anyone to take the place of outgoing Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki. General Tommy Franks and Shinseki's vice chief, General John "Jack" Keane, want no part of the job. After winning a lightning war against Iraq, Franks suddenly announced his retirement. He and Keane witnessed how Rumsfeld and his coterie of advisers and consultants, who never once lifted a weapon in the defense of their country, constantly ignored and publicly abused Shinseki. Army Secretary and retired General Tom White resigned after a number of clashes with Rumsfeld and his cabal. The Commander of the First Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq, Lt. Gen. James Conway, said he was surprised that he encountered no chemical weapons in Iraq.

Perhaps Conway was surprised because that is what the neocons wanted him and his fellow Marines to believe. Conway and his fellow troops were merely additional victims of "Weaponsgate." Paul Wolfowitz, a chief neocon cabalist, let the cat out of the bag in Singapore when he said that everyone could agree on a cause of war being Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. That would be the common denominator in justifying an attack, whether or not such weapons could ever be found. Wolfowitz also stated that Iraq's swimming on a "sea of oil" was the reason its had to be attacked and not, for example, North Korea.

The fact that weapons of mass destruction are actually possessed by North Korea, a country lacking any significant natural resources, is of no concern to the neocons. Oil was and is the bottom line in Iraq. Sometimes, even the liars trip up and actually tell the truth. But only in a world where the neocons have enjoyed a stranglehold on the corporate media can Wolfowitz's supporters claim he was misquoted and the UK's Guardian be forced to print a clarification, one step short of a retraction. Congenital liars like Wolfowitz should never be given the benefit of the doubt on any issue..

Bush's press secretary, Ari Fleischer, who has had his own problem with recognizing the truth, was obviously concerned how the history books will treat him. He decided to leave his post mid-term rather than face the music over his repeated distortions about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as a cassus belli.

Other Bush administration officials, political and career, have also jumped off what appears to be a rapidly sinking ship of state. They include Richard Haass, who as the director for policy planning, was number three at the State Department; Christine Todd Whitman, Environmental Protection Agency administrator; Rand Beers, the senior National Security Council director for counter-terrorism; and State Department career Foreign Service officers John H. Brown, John Brady Kiesling, and Mary A. Wright.

Then there was the sudden firing of retired General Jay Garner as U.S. viceroy of Iraq. He was "outed" as having past associations with the neocons, especially the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). But when Garner started to show some independence in Baghdad, especially with regard to handing over some power to Iraqis, he was quickly sacked and replaced by Paul Bremer, a former Heritage Foundation flunky and Kissinger Associates director who was obviously more in tune with the ideological bent of the neocons. In a Pentagon where the civilian neocons don't trust the uniformed flag rank officers, Garner likely became a threat, a potential Trojan horse who had to be replaced by someone whose loyalty was beyond question.

The most dramatic revolt against George W. Bush and Tony Blair can be seen from the high-level leaks of classified information from the top levels of American and British intelligence. Just consider that the United States has never experienced such repeated leaks of classified information since the years of the spies in the 1980s, a time when a number of intelligence employees were caught selling U.S. secrets to the Russians and Israelis. Yet, the current leaks are not acts of treason, but acts of unbridled patriotism.

The leaks from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), CIA, State Department, and other agencies are testimony to the deep divisions within the Bush administration over the phony war on Iraq. Intelligence agencies that are often at odds with one another over policy have united like never before in blowing the whistle on the neocon agenda. The Bush administration lied flat out over the Iraqi WMD and Iraq's links to al Qaeda. It's just that simple. Career intelligence officers, who know the penalties for the unauthorized disclosure of classified information, are showing more courage than most of the Democrats in Congress who seem more fearful of the neocons and their supporters than in exposing "Weaponsgate."

The most recent classified disclosure was a DIA report on chemical weapons that concluded that there was "no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing or stockpiling chemical weapons or whether Iraq has or will establish its chemical agent production facilities."

On June 8, the Bush administration paraded its usual shills, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, before the Sunday talking head shows. Rice and Powell said they based their claims that Iraq had WMD on an October 1, 2002, national intelligence "white paper." But that paper stated that Iraq had a capability to produce chemical weapons within its chemical industry, not that it was producing such weapons. Hans Blix recently said the so-called intelligence passed to him by the Bush regime was useless for his own UN weapons inspection team in its search for WMD in Iraq. It now appears that all the so-called U.S. and British "intelligence" was nothing more than a collection of neocon propaganda and disinformation.

Last March, a classified State Department report, prepared by the Bureau of Intelligence and Research and titled "Iraq, the Middle East and Change: No Dominoes," countered neocon claims that a democracy in Iraq would foster democracy throughout the Middle East. The report, dated February 26, 2003, concluded that democracy would be difficult to achieve in Iraq, electoral democracy in Iraq would be exploited by anti-American elements, and that the idea that other Middle East nations would be transformed into democracies is not credible.

So far, all those predictions have come true. Iraq is currently an American protectorate lacking even fundamental human services, anti- American Shi'as in the south are increasingly venting their anger at U.S. occupiers, and far from extending democracy throughout the Middle East, Mauritania's Arab pro-American government barely survived a military coup attempt by Islamist and pro-Iraqi elements in the counry's armed forces. So much for the Middle East "domino theory" concocted by Richard Perle and his American Enterprise Institute clones and parroted by Bush in a speech before the right- wing "think tank" the same day the State Department prepared its opposite report.

In another slap at the neocons, who have supported the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi, the CIA leaked a classified report about their favorite Iraqi. The report, which surfaced in April 2003, concluded that Chalabi had little popular support among the Iraqi people. No wonder then that it is Chalabi who appears to be the source for all the bogus intelligence about Iraqi WMD, Saddam Hussein's links to al Qaeda, Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger, and other false flag intelligence. Chalabi, who is as big a liar as his neocon friends, hoped to lull American intelligence into believing him over seasoned Middle East intelligence hands. No one but Rumsfeld; former CIA Director James Woolsey (who has taken hundreds of thousands of consulting dollars from Chalabi over the years); Wolfowitz; Doug Feith; America's new monitor for the Middle East peace road map, John Wolf; and their comrades were taken in by Chalabi, a wanted scofflaw from justice in Jordan.

One day the names Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Woolsey, and Chalabi will become as familiar to students of "Weaponsgate" as the names Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Liddy, Mitchell, and Stans are familiar to those who study Watergate. And in a very interesting nexus between the two scandals, Richard Nixon's former counselor John W. Dean has written that Bush's lying about the reasons for the United States to go to war is an impeachable offense.

For those who are looking for the straw that broke the camel's back in "Weaponsgate" they need not look any farther than Number 10 Downing Street. The troubles that Tony Blair is now experiencing may be a harbinger for things to come in Washington. Blair is in deep trouble and he knows it. After returning from the G-8 summit in Evian, France, Blair was reported by The Obsever to be running around Number 10 in a pathetic panic. In a moment of temporary insanity, which must have been precious to people who loathe Blair, the toothy Prime Minister was pacing about his residence and yelling that people needed to get a grip on what was happening. One of Blair's aides had to comfort Blair and convince him that his advisers were on his side.

Blair must have had thoughts of John Major getting ready stick it to Margaret Thatcher or of Brutus getting ready to plunge a knife into the back of Julius Caesar. Blair's political opponents within his own Labor party had seized on his government's use of a "dodgy dossier" on Iraqi WMD to support the attack on Iraq as an example of Blair's deceit. The dossier, titled "Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation," was based on a 12-year-old PhD thesis culled from the Internet and the bogus Chalabi documents about Nigerien uranium.

The revolt against Blair should serve as a warning for Bush. Just consider what is happening in Britain. Blair has been abandoned by some of his most senior government officials, including former Leader of the House of Commons Foreign Secretary Robin Cook and former International Development Minister Clare Short, in addition to a number of lesser Cabinet officials. Over 70 of Blair's Labor members of the House of Commons are in open revolt against his duplicity. No wonder Godric Smith, Blair's official spokesman, announced his resignation the same day that Ari Fleischer was announcing his departure in Washington.

The wheels are coming off the transatlantic neocon wagon. New Labor and the "Compassionate Conservative" Republican Party have been shown to be total ruses. Their war policies and global domination goals have been thoroughly exposed as neo-fascist manifestations of the teachings of neocon philosopher Leo Strauss.

But Blair faces an even more serious revolt from his intelligence officials. Blair's use of bogus intelligence to claim that Britain had only a 45-minute warning prior to an Iraqi chem-bio attack reportedly resulted in the threatened resignations of the heads of MI- 6 and MI-5, Sir Richard Dearlove and Eliza Manningham-Buller, respectively, And there was the leak of a January 31, 2003, Top Secret memo from the National Security Agency to its Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) counterpart, which asked for British help in electronically snooping on members and non-members of the UN Security Council to determine their stance on America's anti- Iraq UN resolution. That memo was reportedly leaked with a wink and a nod from the highest levels of British intelligence.

The public row in Britain has forced Alastair Campbell, Blair's own Karl Rove-like spinmeister, to apologize to the British Security Services for combining their intelligence material with the bogus material it used in developing the Iraqi WMD dossier. However, some of Blair's advisers seem willing to go down with their prime minister faster than the deck hands on the Titanic. Blair's new House of Commons leader John Reid, a former member of the British Communist Party, ranted that "rogue elements" within the intelligence services were leaking classified information to bring down the government. Reid also stated that for all anyone knew, the leaks were coming from some "man in a pub." Such are the cynical words from a government on the brink of collapse.

Blair is not the only "Coalition of the Willing" partner beginning to get nervous. Australian Prime Minister John Howard is distancing himself from the forged and phony intelligence on Iraqi WMD, claiming his intelligence services took at face value what was presented by the Americans and British. Denmark, which has very little tolerance for lying prime ministers, is opening up a parliamentary investigation of why Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen lied about the Iraqi WMD. Bush's allies in Spain and Italy face similar inquiries.

And what of Bush saying the United States will help its friends and punish its foes? Well, it seems that Mr. Bush cannot be trusted to take care of his friends. Iceland was one of the countries that signed up to Bush's so-called "coalition." How has Bush repaid the North Atlantic nation? By writing a letter to Iceland's prime minister stating that the United States will, after 46 years of providing for the NATO nation's defense, pull its military forces from the soon-to-be defenseless island state.

The Icelandic prime minister, like his colleagues in Denmark, Australia, Spain, Italy, Portugal, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, has found out the hard way of what price is paid for aligning with a dishonest and illegal regime. They will suffer the consequences. However, the leaders of France, Germany, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, and the other countries who withstood constant berating from Washington and the American ambassadors accredited to them, can take heart in the fact that they were correct all along.

posted 07-07-2003 01:29 AM            

Where Are WMDs? Where's Congress?

(CBS) Is Congress going to have the guts to do a proper autopsy on the Iraqi WMD controversy? In his latest Against the Grain commentary, CBSNews.com's Dick Meyer hopes for the best and predicts the worst, given that the lawmakers have chosen closed hearing. WASHINGTON, June 20, 2003

The WMD-Gate Inquisition has begun not with a bang but a whisper.

posted 07-07-2003 04:52 PM            

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s896818.htm

Monday, July 7, 2003. 6:00pm (AEST)

Iraq has no hidden weapons: top scientist

A senior Iraqi scientist involved in the country's original program of weapons of mass destruction says he is not aware of any hidden stockpiles or concealed research.

The scientist, who asked that his identity not be disclosed, has told the BBC that he once helped to produce mustard gas and hid it from UN inspectors.

The British-trained chemist said Saddam Hussein's regime drafted him into the early weapons research during the 1980s.

He says that after the first Gulf War he helped hide stocks for future conflicts.

But according to the scientist, the regime later decided that the political cost of being caught was too high and it scrapped what weapons it had.

The scientist then worked in an Iraqi agency set up to track UN inspectors and stop them from prying into Iraqi intelligence services.

posted 07-08-2003 02:06 AM            

If you blinked--or were busy buying hot-dogs and beer for a Fourth of July cookout--you might have missed the latest evidence that George W. Bush misrepresented the threat from Iraq as he guided the country into invasion and occupation in the Middle East.

The day before Independence Day, Richard Kerr, a former CIA deputy director who is leading a review of the CIA's prewar intelligence on Iraq's unconventional weapons, held a series of interviews with journalists and revealed that his unfinished inquiry had so far found that the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction had been somewhat ambiguous, that analysts at the CIA and other intelligence services had received pressure from the Bush administration, and that the CIA had not found any proof of operational ties between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime.

In other words, Bush lied.

Bush had said that intelligence gathered by the United States and other nations had determined--"no doubt"--that Hussein possessed WMDs, and he had declared that the Iraqi dictator was "dealing" with al Qaeda. Kerr's statements undermined these vital assertions Bush had made to justify the war.

Kerr was not trying to be difficult. His remarks were primarily pro-CIA. He maintained that the agency had been right to tell Bush and top administration officials that Hussein was seeking WMDs. He said that intelligence analysts had resisted pressure and had done a fine job, considering the limited amount of material they had to work with. Kerr noted that US intelligence analysts had been forced to rely upon information from the early and mid-1990s and had little hard evidence to evaluate after 1998 (when UN weapons inspectors left the Iraq). The material that did come in after then was mostly "circumstantial" or "inferential," he said. It was "less specific and detailed" than in earlier years, "scattered." Speaking to The Washington Post, he commented, "It would have been very hard to conclude those [WMD] programs were not continuing, based on the reports being gathered in recent years." And he noted that CIA intelligence reports included the "appropriate caveats" regarding their less-than-definitive conclusions. (An unclassified CIA report released last October said, without qualification, "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons." But its supporting material was nuanced, and Kerr noted that intelligence analysts usually pointed out that their information was not perfect.)

Though Kerr did not say so outright, his findings indicate that there was no hard-and-fast intelligence that Iraq possessed ready-to-go chemical or biological weapons. Yet that is what Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Ari Fleischer and other administration officials had asserted repeatedly. In his interviews, Kerr remarked that US intelligence analysts were right to assume, based on older evidence and more recent circumstantial material, that Iraq was maintaining its unconventional weapons programs. But developing weapons is not the same as possessing weapons. Bush and his advisers did not argue that the United States was compelled to go to war--rather than support more intrusive inspections--because Hussein had ongoing weapons programs; they claimed the United States had to invade because it was imminently threatened by actual weapons that were in Hussein's mitts (and that he could slip at any moment to his partners in al Qaeda).

Before the war, there was little doubt that Hussein had a fancy for mass-killing weapons and was defying UN disarmament resolutions in part to maintain programs to develop such awful devices. Yet a desire for WMDs and a development program are not as threatening as the real things, and Bush and his colleagues said the intelligence showed--without question--Hussein was armed with biological and chemical weapons, was close to building a nuclear bomb, and was in league with Osama bin Laden. Kerr's comments offer further proof none of this was true.

So did front-page headlines scream, "Former Deputy CIA Director Contradicts Bush's Key War Claims"? Nope. Kerr's remarks were treated more as a hiccup than a bombshell. A search of the Lexis-Nexis newspaper database turned up only three stories that were published; they appeared in the Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The San Diego Union-Tribune. And the headlines focused on Kerr's rah-rahing for the CIA. "Basis for Arms Claims Affirmed" (the Post). "Official Backs Prewar Claims" ( The Los Angeles). "Internal Review Backs CIA on Iraqi Weapons" ( The San Diego Union-Tribune). Each piece emphasized Kerr's endorsement of the CIA's analysts, rather than the fact that his findings revealed that the Bush administration had misrepresented the work of the analysts. As of this writing, The New York Times has not published a word about Kerr's preliminary findings. You think it's a coincidence that Kerr spoke to reporters the day prior to a long holiday weekend? You don't have to be James Bond to figure that out.

Slowly, official material is seeping out that confirms the allegation that Bush and his national security crew misled the country into war. Last week, Representative Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, referred to preliminary findings of a review being conducted by her committee. This examination, like Kerr's, has found that the intelligence analysts had attached caveats and qualifiers to their assessments of the WMD threat from Iraq (which Bush never bothered to mention) and that there had been no good intelligence linking Hussein with bin Laden. (Click here to read more about her remarks.)

posted 07-08-2003 09:03 PM            

Bring 'Em On? --We Are Losing This War "

By Stan Goff

From: | http://www.counterpunch.org/goff07032003.html

A Former Special Forces Soldier Responds to Bush's Invitation for Iraqis to Attack US Troops

"Bring 'Em On?"

By STAN GOFF

In 1970, when I arrived at my unit, Company A, 4th Battalion/503rd Infantry, 173rd Airborne Brigade, in what was then the Republic of Vietnam, I was charged up for a fight. I believed that if we didn't stop the communists in Vietnam, we'd eventually be fighting this global conspiracy in the streets of Hot Springs, Arkansas. I'd been toughened by Basic Training, Infantry Training and Parachute Training, taught how to use my weapons and equipment, and I was confident in my ability to vanquish the skinny unter-menschen. So I was dismayed when one of my new colleagues--a veteran who'd been there ten months--told me, "We are losing this war."

Not only that, he said, if I wanted to survive for my one year there, I had to understand one very basic thing. All Vietnamese were the enemy, and for us, the grunts on the ground, this was a race war. Within one month, it was apparent that everything he told me was true, and that every reason that was being given to the American public for the war was not true.

We had a battalion commander whom I never saw. He would fly over in a Loach helicopter and give cavalier instructions to do things like "take your unit 13 kilometers to the north." In the Central Highlands, 13 kilometers is something we had to hack out with machetes, in 98-degree heat, carrying sometimes 90 pounds over our body weights, over steep, slippery terrain. The battalion commander never picked up a machete as far as we knew, and after these directives he'd fly back to an air-conditioned headquarters in LZ English near Bong-son. We often fantasized together about shooting his helicopter down as a way of relieving our deep resentment against this faceless, starched and spit-shined despot.

Yesterday, when I read that US Commander-in-Chief George W. Bush, in a moment of blustering arm-chair machismo, sent a message to the 'non-existent' Iraqi guerrillas to "bring 'em on," the first image in my mind was a 20-year-old soldier in an ever-more-fragile marriage, who'd been away from home for 8 months. He participated in the initial invasion, and was told he'd be home for the 4th of July. He has a newfound familiarity with corpses, and everything he thought he knew last year is now under revision. He is sent out into the streets of Fallujah (or some other city), where he has already been shot at once or twice with automatic weapons or an RPG, and his nerves are raw. He is wearing Kevlar and ceramic body armor, a Kevlar helmet, a load carrying harness with ammunition, grenades, flex-cuffs, first-aid gear, water, and assorted other paraphernalia. His weapon weighs seven pounds, ten with a double magazine. His boots are bloused, and his long-sleeve shirt is buttoned at the wrist. It is between 100-110 degrees Fahrenheit at midday. He's been eating MRE's three times a day, when he has an appetite in this heat, and even his urine is beginning to smell like preservatives. Mosquitoes and sand flies plague him in the evenings, and he probably pulls a guard shift every night, never sleeping straight through. He and his comrades are beginning to get on each others' nerves. The rumors of 'going-home, not-going-home' are keeping him on an emotional roller coaster. Directives from on high are contradictory, confusing, and often stupid. The whole population seems hostile to him and he is developing a deep animosity for Iraq and all its people--as well as for official narratives.

This is the lad who will hear from someone that George W. Bush, dressed in a suit with a belly full of rich food, just hurled a manly taunt from a 72-degree studio at the 'non-existent' Iraqi resistance.

This de facto president is finally seeing his poll numbers fall. Even chauvinist paranoia has a half-life, it seems. His legitimacy is being eroded as even the mainstream press has discovered now that the pretext for the war was a lie. It may have been control over the oil, after all. Anti-war forces are regrouping as an anti-occupation movement. Now, exercising his one true talent--blundering--George W. Bush has begun the improbable process of alienating the very troops upon whom he depends to carry out the neo-con ambition of restructuring the world by arms.

Somewhere in Balad, or Fallujah, or Baghdad, there is a soldier telling a new replacement, "We are losing this war."

Stan Goff is the author of "Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti" (Soft Skull Press, 2000) and of the upcoming book "Full Spectrum Disorder" (Soft Skull Press, 2003). He retired in 1996 from the US Army, from 3rd Special Forces. He lives in Raleigh.

posted 07-09-2003 08:01 AM            

09jul03
http://www.theadvertiser.news.com.au/common/story_page/
0,5936,6725039%255E421,00.html

THE Federal Government knew there were doubts about intelligence on Iraq's nuclear program but still used it to justify going to war, a former Australian intelligence officer said today.

Andrew Wilkie, a former senior analyst with the Office of National Assessment (ONA), resigned from his post in March in protest at the Government's stance on Iraq.

He has since given evidence to a British parliamentary inquiry into intelligence on Iraq used to justify the case for war.

Mr Wilkie said the ONA had made it clear to the Australian Government there were doubts about Iraq's nuclear weapons program after receiving advice from the United States.

But Prime Minister John Howard has denied he knew the intelligence claims were in question.

"I find it quite extraordinary that the prime minister and the Foreign Minister (Alexander Downer) are still denying that we knew that there was ever any doubts about the Iraq nuclear story," Mr Wilkie told ABC radio.

"The facts of this matter are that the US State Department sent a diplomat to Niger in early 2002, Mr (Joseph) Wilson.

"He would have reported back to the US State Department not long after that visit to say that he thought the documentation was a fake.

"The State Department would have passed that information on to its own intelligence agency, the INR (Institute for Nuclear Research), which has a very close relationship with ONA and would certainly have passed that information on to ONA."

Mr Wilkie said an INR official had confirmed the information was passed to ONA.

"As always the Prime Minister is being very careful with his words and he's saying that ONA never received Mr Wilson's report," he said.

"And nor would we receive a report from an American diplomat.

"But we would have received a report from INR casting doubt over the whole Iraq nuclear story.

"I'm saying that ONA had made it quite clear to the Government that there was a question mark over the whole nuclear dimension of this Iraq story.

"But yet the Government continue to use that nuclear dimension as an explanation for the war along with the more credible stories about Iraq's chemical and biological programs."

Labor today called on Mr Howard to explain after the US backed away from its pre-war claims.

The Washington Post newspaper said the White House had acknowledged for the first time that US President George W Bush was wrong to claim Iraq had sought to buy uranium in Africa.

posted 07-09-2003 10:08 AM            

Bush Tries to Deflect Criticism of Prewar Intelligence on Iraq
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 10:45 a.m. ET

PRETORIA, South Africa (AP) -- President Bush on Wednesday defended his use of prewar intelligence on Iraq, saying he is ``absolutely confident'' in his actions despite the discovery that one claim he made about Saddam Hussein's weapons pursuits was based on false information.

Democrats have argued that the White House's acknowledgment that Bush misspoke earlier this year when he said Saddam tried to buy uranium in Africa justifies a broad review of how the administration used prewar intelligence on Iraq.

Bush, at a news conference here with South African President Thabo Mbeki during a five-nation African tour, took on his critics.

``There's no doubt in my mind that when it's all said and done the facts will show the world the truth,'' he said. ``There's going to be, you know, a lot of attempts to try to rewrite history, and I can understand that. But I'm absolutely confident in the decision I made.''

Bush did not directly address the misstatement itself, made during his State of the Union address. Instead, he defended his decision to go to war based on a larger body of information.

``There is no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the world peace,'' the president said. ``And there's no doubt in my mind that the United States ... did the right thing in removing him from power.''

Back home, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday that the administration decided to use military force in Iraq because the information about the threat of Saddam's regime was seen with a different perspective after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

``The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass murder,'' Rumsfeld said. ``We acted because we saw the existing evidence in a new light through the prism of our experience on Sept. 11.''

The uranium claim was raising concerns among Democrats, who said more was needed despite several investigations now under way in Congress.

``This is a very important admission,'' Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota said Tuesday. ``It's a recognition that we were provided faulty information. And I think it's all the more reason why a full investigation of all of the facts surrounding this situation be undertaken.''

Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said: ``The reported White House statements only reinforce the importance of an inquiry into why the information about the bogus uranium sales didn't reach the policy-makers during 2002 and why, as late as the president's State of the Union address in January 2003, our policy-makers were still using information which the intelligence community knew was almost certainly false.''

The Bush administration used purported Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as a major justification for the war, and the failure to find such weapons so far has generated intense criticism from some Democrats.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer set off a furor Monday when, under questioning by reporters, he acknowledged that Bush was incorrect in his State of the Union speech when he said ``the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.''

Wednesday, Fleischer said that ``this type of information should not have risen to the level of a presidential speech.''

But, he added, ``this is a classic issue of hindsight is 20-20.''

``There's a bigger picture here,'' Fleischer told reporters traveling with Bush to South Africa. He repeated administration assertions that Saddam Hussein was trying to reconstitute a weapons of mass destruction program.

Other White House officials elaborated on Fleischer's remarks Tuesday, saying the United States had additional evidence of Iraq's nuclear intentions.

Michael Anton, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said that when Bush made the speech, there was other intelligence indicating Iraq had tried to acquire uranium from several countries in Africa. This other information, however, was not detailed or specific enough to prove such a contention, he said.

The claim rested significantly on a letter or letters between officials in Iraq and Niger that were obtained by European intelligence agencies. The communications are now accepted as forged.

Anton acknowledged such on Tuesday, but also said the documents were not the sole basis for the Iraq-Africa statement in Bush's speech.

``Because of this lack of specificity, this reporting alone did not rise to the level of inclusion in a presidential speech,'' Anton said. ``That said, the issue of Iraq's attempts to acquire uranium from abroad was not an element underpinning the judgment reached by most intelligence agencies that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.''

On Sunday, Joseph Wilson, an envoy sent to Africa to investigate allegations about Iraq's nuclear weapons program, said the Bush administration manipulated his findings, possibly to strengthen the rationale for war.

Wilson insisted in an NBC-TV interview that his doubts about the purported Iraq-Niger connection reached the highest levels of government, including Vice President Dick Cheney's office. In fact, he said, Cheney's office inquired about the purported Niger-Iraq link.

Fleischer said Monday that Cheney did not request information about Wilson's mission to Niger, was not informed of his mission and was not aware of it until press reports accounted for it.

Rep. Henry Waxman of California, the top Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, wrote to Bush on Tuesday outlining a letter he received from the International Atomic Energy Agency regarding the forged Niger documents.

The letter ``raises new questions about why the administration withheld the evidence from the IAEA for over six crucial weeks in December and January and -- even then -- failed to share the conclusions of U.S. intelligence officials that the evidence was bogus.''

Democrats seeking their party's presidential nomination, including Sens. Bob Graham of Florida and John Kerry of Massachusetts and Reps. Richard Gephardt of Missouri and Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, also called for further investigation.

posted 07-09-2003 10:20 AM            

President Renews Pledge on Helping to Stabilize Liberia
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 9:47 a.m. ET

PRETORIA, South Africa (AP) -- President Bush pledged Wednesday that the United States will ``be involved'' in war-torn Liberia but said he would not overextend U.S. armed forces if he sends troops there to join a peacekeeping force.

On the second day of a five-country African tour, Bush did not commit himself to deploying troops to Liberia. Civil war has dragged on for years and conditions in Monrovia have become desperate amid a political stalemate involving President Charles Taylor.

South African President Thabo Mbeki pressed Bush on whether the United States planned to play a role in the crisis. ``I said, 'Yes, we'll be involved,' and we're now discussing the extent of our involvement,'' Bush told reporters during a joint news conference with Mbeki.

The United States already has about 8,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, about 150,000 in Iraq and 2,500 in Kosovo. Bush said that whatever he decides to do about Liberia, ``we won't overextend our troops, period .''

Mbeki said that the military burden in Liberia peacekeeping ``really ought to principally fall on us as Africans.''

The United States has trained battalions of African troops, Bush said, and ``helping people help themselves'' was one method of ensuring the U.S. military would not become stretched too thin there.

``It's in our interest that we continue that strategy so that we don't get overextended,'' Bush said.

Bush also wants African leaders to put more pressure on President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe to step down and hold new elections. Mbeki has insisted that he will not pressure Mugabe.

But on Wednesday, the two leaders played down any differences. ``President Bush and myself are absolutely of one mind about the urgent need to address the political and economic challenges of Zimbabwe,'' Mbeke said. He added that he will look to the United States for financial support once the country stabilizes.

Bush said he would not ``second-guess'' Mbeke's tactics in dealing with the situation.

``The president is the person most involved'' in mediating troubles in Zimbabwe, Bush said. ``He believes he's making good progress.''

AIDS was also discussed during Bush's visit to South Africa, which has 5 million people infected -- the highest number on the continent. South Africa is one of the countries intended to benefit from Bush's proposed five-year, $15 billion AIDS initiative for the 14 hardest-hit African and Caribbean countries.

``South Africa has recently increased its budget to fight the disease, and we noticed and we appreciate that,'' Bush said. ``People across Africa have the will to fight this disease, but often not the resources, and the United States is willing to put up the resources to help win the fight. ``

From the meeting and joint availability, Bush joined Mbeki and about 250 others for an elaborate lunch in the South African leader's guest residence. In the afternoon, Bush visited a Ford Motor Co. auto manufacturing plant -- one of the company's largest in the Southern Hemisphere -- for a tour and briefing on a local program to battle AIDS.

On the evening agenda was a dinner with South African and U.S. business executives at the home of U.S. Ambassador Cameron Hume.

On a trip aimed as much at broadening the president's political popularity at home -- especially among minorities -- as at his foreign audiences, Bush is spending more time in South Africa than any other country. South Africa's apartheid system of white-minority rule oppressed black Africans through the 20th century.

``Your nation's recent history is a great story of courage and persistence in the pursuit of justice,'' Bush said. ``This is a country that threw off oppression and is now the force of freedom and stability, and a force for progress, throughout the continent of Africa.''

But absent from Bush's schedule is any appearance or meeting with Nelson Mandela, who preceded Mbeki as South Africa's president. Mandela, the popular leader and hero of the anti-apartheid movement, has been a harsh and outspoken critic of Bush for leading the war against Iraq without support from the United Nations.

Administration officials have said Bush's time was being reserved for current African heads of state. Mandela was expected to be out of the country.

Bush's visit drew dozens of South African protesters to the streets outside the U.S. Embassy here and the consulates in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Protests by political parties, trade unions and other groups were planned during Bush's stay in southern Africa, which ends Friday.

Besides resentment over the war, South Africa's generally positive relations with the United States were dealt a blow by the Bush administration's decision to end military aid to 35 countries, including South Africa, that opposed the U.S. demand for immunity for Americans in the International Criminal Court.

posted 07-09-2003 01:33 PM            

Cut those NY TIMES links in half sections and the margins will return to normal.

posted 07-09-2003 02:05 PM            

uhh...wait a minute...davids a nobody....

nevermind....

posted 07-09-2003 04:54 PM            

Not as bad as other times.

posted 07-10-2003 04:51 AM            

10 July 2003

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=423254

The row over Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction has been slow to reach America, but it is starting to become as much of a headache for President George Bush as it is for Tony Blair.

The catalyst was the White House's acknowledgement, slipped out late on Monday as the President was leaving for Africa, that Mr Bush should not have included the discredited intelligence claims about uranium from Niger in his State of the Union address.

That admission came after confirmation that the CIA itself had reported to the White House in March 2002 that the documents purporting to chronicle Iraq's deal with Niger were almost certainly fakes.

The long-cowed Democrats are finally pitching in. "The whole world knew this was a fraud," Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said of the documents. He demanded a full investigation into how the allegations found their way into the State of the Union speech on 28 January 2003.

The Bush administration's response yesterday was to brush the matter off, or change the subject. Questioned in South Africa on the fiasco, Mr Bush said merely that he was sure the US had "done the right thing" in toppling Saddam. Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, said the mistake was just "one single sentence" in the January address.

But the Democratic candidates vying for Mr Bush's job are also savaging his administration, ensuring that the controversy over Iraq and its unsubstantiated weapons programmes will stay on the boil.

The issue has helped to propel Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont and outspoken critic of the war, to the front of the Democratic pack.

The demands for an investigation will give new impetus to inquiries by at least three committees on Capitol Hill. The House and Senate intelligence committees are preparing hearings, while the Senate's Armed Services Committee is asking pointed questions.

In addition the House Appropriations Committee, which has just approved a $369bn Pentagon budget for 2004, is also considering its own inquiry into whether Donald Rumsfeld's staff distorted pre-war intelligence on Iraq.

posted 07-11-2003 10:35 AM            

by David T. Pyne, Center for the National Security Interest

11 July 2003
http://www.intellectualconservative.com/article2464.html

In retrospect it is painfully clear that Saddam and Iraq never posed any threat either in terms of intention or capabilities against either American civilians here at home or even to US troops which were invading their own country.

According to a poll conducted last week by the University of Maryland, 52 percent of Americans believe the Bush administration either "stretched the truth" about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or told outright lies. Only 32 percent said they thought the government was being "fully truthful" about the Iraqi arsenal. Similarly, 56 percent of those polled believed the US government stretched the truth or made outright false statements about Hussein's ties to al-Qaeda.

As witnessed by this latest poll, the American people are finally beginning to realize the truth about the war in Iraq and how the Bush Administration deliberately deceived the American people on Iraqi WMD and other issues to attempt to justify a war, which could not be justified on that or any other grounds. This war represented a marked departure from America's previous 227-year Judeo-Christian just war tradition. For one of the first times in US history, America was the aggressor against a country that our Secretary of State admitted posed no threat to the United States and which has since been proven to lack even a rudimentary capability to even defend itself against invasion let alone threaten another.

This policy, far from being conservative in nature, represents a continuance of the Clinton foreign policy of transforming the United States into an aggressor power that attacks countries that pose no threat to it as was the case when the Clintonites targeted Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Sudan, Kosovo and Iraq for military action without even the most rudimentary justification back in the 1990s. Only in Afghanistan in 1998 was the application of US military power by the Clinton Administration justified, although even then it represented an attempt to 'wag the dog' and divert attention from the House vote to impeach him. Ultimately, it resulted in a couple dozen million dollar cruise missiles hitting a bunch of empty tents in the desert at an Al Queda training camp.

Likewise, the Bush Administration's invasion of Afghanistan was amply justified and properly executed in response to the Al Queda suicide bomber attack against America on 9-11 under the time-honored rules of just war. However, as in the case of Iraq, the Administration has signaled no plans to ever withdraw the US military presence from that beleaguered country or its neighbors in Central Asia, and American troops are increasingly paying the price with their lives as they continue to be subjected to attacks from local insurgents. Today US troops, whose primary constitutional role is defense of the US homeland, find themselves deployed in nearly 200 nations the world over. The US military and particularly the US Army is suffering badly from imperial overstretch even as calls to further slash its force structure continue to ring out from Rumsfeld and his chief lieutenants at the Bush Department of Defense.

Testimony by the Director of the CIA, George Tenet, and a CIA intelligence report issued last fall confirmed that Iraq did not pose an actual or imminent threat to the US but merely a "potential threat" which might emerge several years from now. At the time, Mr. Tenet testified to Congress that "it appears that Iraq had drawn a line in the sand against targeting the US with terrorist action or WMD attack," but that it might change its policy were the US to invade it. Why then did Bush choose to invade it and presumably provoke the very kind of action which he was supposedly fighting to prevent? We can all be very thankful that Saddam chose to destroy his weapons of mass destruction prior to the invasion rather than use them against our brave US fighting soldiers. In retrospect it is painfully clear that Saddam and Iraq never posed any threat either in terms of intention or capabilities against either American civilians here at home or even to US troops which were invading their own country.

As casualties continue to mount against our heroic troops in Iraq, rather than do the right thing and set a near-term time table for the withdraw of our armies of occupation, the Administration has declared that they will remain there indefinitely. If they do, they will almost certainly be subjected to an increased tempo of guerilla and terrorist attacks from the understandably resentful citizens of Iraq, who prefer self-determination and democracy to occupation by a foreign power. America was not meant by its founders to be an aggressor state or an empire, but rather a constitutional republic under God.

Nearly three months after our victory over Iraq, and after untold thousands of searches, the Administration has been unable to locate a single weapon of mass destruction in Iraq. Over one-hundred and fifty of our brave fighting men and women have been killed in action and an equal number of families have suffered immeasurable loss, not to mention the loss of several thousand lives of Iraqi soldiers who died defending their country and Iraqi civilians. Has the price of empire been worth it? The price has already been far too high for too many American families who have had loved ones die without a just cause to console them and justify their heroic sacrifice.

The American people believed the President and were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt with regards to his unconfirmed allegations of possession of threatening weapons of mass destruction by Iraq. However, their patience is wearing increasingly thin as the evidence comes out that the Administration may have knowingly deceived them and manufactured intelligence to support their unsupportable claims. Ultimately, this unjust war may well be the undoing of the Bush presidency. Given that the alternative outcome of a Democrat presidency would almost certainly result in even greater harm to the American republican system of government, hopefully that will not be the case.

posted 07-12-2003 01:58 PM            

The official explanation has now solidified.
Although the CIA initially seemed reluctant to take the fall for the Bush administration, indeed stating that they warned the administration 10 months before Bush gave his State of the Union speech that the claims about Iraq trying to purchase uranium in Africa were untrue, they are now rolling over and taking the fall for Bush's lie.

CIA Director George Tenet is now claiming that the CIA "wrongly allowed" Bush to deliver his lie to the nation. Were they supposed to forcefully stop him somehow? What more were they supposed to do exactly, after already telling him that the claim was false?

Tenet wrote in a statement, "These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president. This was a mistake."

Yes, that's true. However, the CIA doesn't write the president's speeches. It was a mistake, but it was the Bush administration's mistake. It was hardly the fault of the CIA that the Bush administration made the decision to lie to the country.

But this morning, Condoleezza Rice laid the blame squarely on the CIA, claiming that the speech was cleared with the agency. Some members of Congress demanded that someone be held accountable.

Maybe they should start with Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security advisor.

Maybe someone should be asking the question, "how did this assertion get into Bush's speech in the first place, especially considering the CIA had specifically warned the administration about it 10 months earlier?" Or how about, "why do we keep hearing mumblings of CIA workers saying they felt pressured to produce intelligence reports that would support starting a war?"

If you ask me, it sounds like the Bush administration knows they're in trouble, and they found a scapegoat in the CIA, which has already been causing them grief. By focusing unwanted attention and blame on the CIA, they not only absolve themselves of their misdeed but they also tie the CIA up in defending itself-- killing two birds with one stone.

posted 07-13-2003 05:55 PM            

The Bush administration is caught in a scandal of almost unprecedented dimensions over the justifications that it and Great Britain gave for going to war against Iraq. Call it the "yellow cake scandal." It goes to the core of whether Saddam Hussein was trying to produce nuclear weapons, thus posing a threat to the United States and Great Britain, which would justify war.

It goes to a charge by President Bush that Iraq was trying to build a nuclear arsenal in which Bush used evidence his administration now acknowledges was no good. The President's people are now saying he was given bad information by the Central Intelligence Agency, but it is worth recalling that in the campaign for a war against Iraq, intelligence sources consistently complained the White House was manipulating intelligence to build support for the war.

"Yellow cake" is the nickname of uranium oxide, a component of nuclear weapons. It is produced, among other places, in two mines (Somair and Cominak) in the west African state of Niger. Working those mines is an international consortium composed of French, Spanish, Japanese, German and Nigerien interests. They, in turn, are closely monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to ensure that no dangerous materials are diverted to unauthorized parties.

In late 2001, a rumor circulated that the government of Iraq was trying to buy yellow cake. In the shadowy world of espionage, it is still unclear who started the rumor. What is known is that some individuals or an organization forged documents to cast blame on Iraq.

The documents were appallingly crude. The letterhead on one document was obviously transplanted from some other, presumably genuine, paper; the signature of the president of Niger was copied; and, most telling of all, one signature was supposedly written by a minister who had been out of office for over a decade.

How these documents reached the British and American governments is also obscure. One story has them acquired by Italian agents and passed to the British intelligence agency (MI6), which passed them to the CIA.

When the documents reached the CIA, officials apparently concluded that, despite the papers' obvious faults, the subject they addressed was too important to be neglected. So, in early 2002, the CIA asked a retired American ambassador with 23 years of experience on African affairs (and who had been stationed in Niger in the 1970s) to investigate.

Ambassador Joseph Wilson, now a business consultant, agreed to fly to Niger to attempt to find out what was behind the story. He has described his experiences and conclusions in articles in The New York Times and the Financial Times.

When Wilson arrived in Niamey, the Nigerien capital, he consulted with the current U.S. ambassador, Barbra Owens-Kirkpatrick, and the embassy staff for whom everything relating to uranium was top priority. They told him that the story was well known and that they had already "debunked" it in reports to Washington. Then, as Wilson writes, "I spent the next eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people: current government officials, former government officials, people associated with the country's uranium business." They uniformly and formally "denied the charges." The Embassy concurred.

Returning to Washington in early March 2002, Wilson reported to the CIA and to the Bureau of African Affairs of the Department of State that, although he had not been shown the documents themselves, he was sure that "there's simply too much oversight over too small an industry for a sale [outside controlled channels] to have transpired." Too many people would have had to give approval and even more would have known about the diversion of uranium. Moreover, since it would have violated UN sanctions, a diversion would have attracted a great deal of notice. In short, he concluded, the transaction did not take place.

In his Op-Ed article in The New York Times last Sunday, Wilson revealed "there should be at least four documents in United States government archives confirming my mission. The documents should include the ambassador's report of my debriefing in Niamey, a separate report written by the embassy staff, a CIA report summing up my trip, and a specific answer from the agency to the office of the vice president (this may have been delivered orally)."

The CIA has confirmed that its account of the matter was distributed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Defense Intelligence Agency in the Pentagon, the Justice Department and the FBI and the office of Vice President Cheney.

His task, Ambassador Wilson concluded, had been accomplished: "the Niger matter was settled and [so I] went back to my life."

Despite this negative report, however, senior officials of the Bush administration continued to stress the nuclear threat from Iraq. In a speech in Nashville on August 26, 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney warned of a Saddam "armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror" who could "directly threaten America's friends throughout the region and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail."

The next month, in September 2002, Wilson was surprised to learn that the British government had published a "dossier" or white paper on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that included the yellow cake story. Assuming this meant that the CIA had not shared with MI6 the results of his investigation, Wilson called his contact at the CIA to suggest that he warn his British counterparts the materials were a hoax.

Wilson assumed that there was another source for the speech President Bush made on October 7, 2002, in Cincinnati in which he warned that "The Iraqi dictator must not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gasses and atomic weapons." But then, on January 28, 2003, he was astonished to hear Bush in the State of the Union address pin his warnings on Saddam Hussein's possession of atomic weapons to the yellow cake story. Bush declared that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

To make its case at the United Nations, the American government turned over the yellow cake documents to the Security Council. When they were examined by the IAEA, its director, Mohamed El-Baradei, informed the Security Council they were fake.

How could the U.S. government not have known? Condoleezza Rice, director of the staff of the National Security Council, replied on Meet the Press. "Maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the [Central Intelligence] Agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery."

At least as early as February 2003, all the decision makers in the Bush administration as well as the general public knew that at least this part of the rationale for the invasion of Iraq was based on forged documents, but this did nothing to deter the U.S. military onslaught.

Almost more astonishing, as late as June 25, 2003, Britain was still insisting in Parliament that it stood by reports that Iraq had been trying to buy yellow cake. Finally, on July 7, the White House acknowledged that the story was a hoax.

Should that put an end to the story? No.

As some critics of the Bush administration have pointed out, when President Bill Clinton lied about an illicit sex affair, he was subjected to a major investigation by half a hundred lawyers and was nearly impeached. President Nixon was forced to resign over the Watergate break-in and President Reagan was been closely questioned over the Iran-Contra scandal.

Important as these scandals were, their significance pales in comparison to launching a war in which hundreds of Americans have died in Iraq and thousands of Iraqis have been killed while their country has been left in a shambles. The United States initially spent nearly $100 billion on the war and is committed to far larger outlays to repair what it destroyed.

It is unlikely that many in America will accept as the last word the president's explanation Friday: "I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services. And it was a speech that detailed to the American people the dangers posed by the Saddam Hussein regime. And my government took the appropriate response to those dangers. And as a result, the world is going to be more secure and more peaceful."

posted 07-13-2003 09:32 PM            

Over 200 of our fellow Americans are DEAD, as well as thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians over the Bu$h administrations LIES. Just that alone are grounds for impeachment as far as I am concerned.