IRAQ: Powell Defends Information He Used to Justify Iraq War

The New York Times International ^ | May 31, 2003 | JAMES DAO and THOM SHANKER

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May 31, 2003

Powell Defends Information He Used to Justify Iraq War

By JAMES DAO and THOM SHANKER

ASHINGTON, May 30 — Secretary of State Colin L. Powell today fiercely defended the intelligence used by the Bush administration to justify war against Iraq, saying he spent several late nights poring over the Central Intelligence Agency's reports because he knew the credibility of the country and the president were at stake.

The C.I.A.'s prewar assessments have been sharply questioned by some intelligence officials and lawmakers in recent days, as American forces have uncovered only limited evidence of unconventional weapons programs and Iraqi ties to terrorists.

After complaints from intelligence officials that they felt Defense Department pressure to support the administration on Iraq, the C.I.A. has started a review to determine whether its prewar assessments of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs were accurate.

Another top official, George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, insisted today that his agency's work had not been compromised by politics.

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

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has also asked the agency to report on its Iraq intelligence, and may hold closed-door hearings on the issue, House officials said.

Mr. Powell used those assessments — along with satellite photographs and intercepted conversations between Iraqi military officers — in a dramatic presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, when he argued that Iraq's weapons programs and links to Al Qaeda made it an imminent threat to the world.

Asked today if he thought those assessments had been politicized to bolster the administration's call to arms, Mr. Powell said no, calling it "solid information" based on multiple sources presented to him by unbiased analysts.

"I went out to the C.I.A., and I spent four days and four nights going over everything that they had," Mr. Powell told reporters traveling on Air Force One to Poland. For three consecutive nights, the chore kept him at the agency until midnight, he said. "I knew that it was the credibility of the United States that was going to be on the line on the fifth of February. The credibility of the president of the United States and my credibility."

At the time, Mr. Powell was widely viewed as the most cautious member of President Bush's national security team on Iraq, and his urgent presentation to the United Nations in February was intended to provide an extra layer of credibility to the administration's case for war.

Mr. Powell argued today that the accuracy of the prewar assessments was proven by the discovery of two Iraqi trailers that the C.I.A. and Pentagon have concluded were designed to produce deadly germs. Mr. Powell presented drawings of suspected mobile biological labs to the United Nations in February.

"You should have seen the smile on my face when one day the intelligence community came in and gave me a photo, and said, `Look,' " Mr. Powell said today. "And it was almost identical to the cartoon that I had put up in New York on the Fifth of February."

But doubts about the accuracy of the prewar intelligence have spread in Congress. In a letter sent last week to George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, the House Intelligence Committee said it intended "to re-evaluate" American intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs and links to terrorists.

"The committee wants to ensure that the intelligence analysis relayed to our policymakers from the intelligence community was accurate, unbiased and timely," said the letter, signed by the committee's Republican chairman, Representative Porter J. Goss of Florida, and ranking Democrat, Representative Jane Harman of California.

A senior military commander on the ground in Iraq also told reporters today that he was surprised that Iraq never fired chemical or biological weapons as American forces drove for Baghdad, and was equally surprised that none of these weapons had yet been found.

"It was a surprise to me then, it remains a surprise to me now, that we have not uncovered weapons, as you say, in some of the forward dispersal sites," said Lt. Gen. James Conway, commander of the First Marine Expeditionary Force. "Again, believe me, it's not for lack of trying."

Speaking to Pentagon reporters in a video teleconference from Iraq, General Conway said, "What the regime was intending to do in terms of its use of the weapons, we thought we understood."

He added, "We were simply wrong."

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And from the Wall Street Journal:

Weapons of Mass Distortion

To certain critics of U.S. policy in Iraq, the only thing worse than going to war with Saddam Hussein is the fact that we won. This they can never forgive -- which is why they are now trying to make a war crime out of the fact that the allies haven't yet found caches of weapons of mass destruction.

For these opponents of war, it isn't enough that a tyrant and his psychopath sons have been deposed. It doesn't count that mass graves have been uncovered, that torture chambers have been exposed, or that Saddam's victims can speak freely for the first time in 30 years. The critics are now claiming the war was illegitimate because no one has yet found a pile of anthrax in downtown Baghdad.

These rather selective moralists are leaping on a distorted report about comments by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on WMD. An advance press release from Vanity Fair magazine spun as news the fact that Mr. Wolfowitz had said the following during an interview in early May: "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason."......................

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And from the Archives (sort of )

Why Arabs Lose Wars

Why Arabs Lose Wars By Norville de Atkine

Abstract: The author argues that the reasons for Arab armies’ perpetual ineffectiveness are rooted in Arab culture. Social factors that prohibit success include: secrecy and paranoia, pride, class structure, a lack of coordination on all levels, and little individual freedom or initiative.

[k2blader]

Bookmarked!

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And Robin Cook weighs in :

ROBIN COOK: BRITAIN MUST NOT BE SUCKERED A SECOND TIME BY THE WHITE HOUSE

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And today we have this from Britain:

IRAQ: WMD source 'was senior Iraqi officer'

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And today we have this correction from Britain:

The Guardian Fully Retracts BOTH Powell/Straw Story AND Wolfowitz "It's All About Oil" Story

Posted on 06/05/2003 9:21 AM PDT by Dont Mention the War

Corrections and clarifications

Thursday June 5, 2003

In our front page lead on May 31 headlined "Straw, Powell had serious doubts over their Iraqi weapons claims," we said that the foreign secretary Jack Straw and his US counterpart Colin Powell had met at the Waldorf Hotel in New York shortly before Mr Powell addressed the United Nations on February 5. Mr Straw has now made it clear that no such meeting took place. The Guardian accepts that and apologises for suggesting it did.

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And reaching back a few days :

Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz Media Availability at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo

See post #2 for statement on Oil and Iraq!

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Additional item from yesterday:

FAS (Fed Am Scientist) Report: Iraqi Precursor Chemicals Stored Separately for Weapon-side Mixing

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items today:

Pentagon in 2002 Found `No Reliable' Iraq Arms Data

June 6 (Bloomberg) -- A U.S. Defense Department report in September 2002 found ``no reliable information'' proving that Iraq had chemical weapons, even as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was saying the country had amassed stockpiles of the banned arms.

``There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or whether Iraq has -- or will -- establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities,'' a report by the Defense Intelligence Agency said in a summary page obtained by Bloomberg News.

The unreleased report said Iraq ``probably'' had stockpiles of banned chemicals, a more tentative conclusion than Rumsfeld was presenting in public remarks. Iraq has ``amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons, including VX, sarin and mustard gas,'' he told Congress on Sept. 19.

The summary from the report suggests ``substantially more uncertainty than was stated by senior administration officials,'' said Kenneth Katzman, a specialist on Iraq's military for the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, who was told of the contents by Bloomberg.

No banned weapons have been found in Iraq. Lawmakers in the U.S. and the U.K. are demanding to know more about the intelligence cited as a reason for invading the Middle East country in March. <.......................

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And reaching back to :

IRAQ: It’s Springtime in Baghdad

He takes good care of his plants, watering them from the river, which is better for flowers and plants, according to his neighbor Abbas Al-Amiri from Al-Amiri nursery. “Tigris water is better than the tap water from the tanks,” he said. As for the red sand that covers Baghdad when the seasonal khamasin winds blow, he said it does the plants no harm. “In fact, it protects them from insects, because we can’t afford to buy the pesticides or the proper soil.”

So who is using the pesticides that are being found?

A large number near other stored weapons!

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And Media bias still at work:

Pentagon intelligence reported no reliable evidence of Iraqi WMD's last September

Content of the article has this:

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Jerusalem Post ^ | Jun. 6, 2003 | THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Posted on 06/06/2003 1:09 PM PDT by yonif

The US Defense Intelligence Agency last fall could not pin down the location of any chemical weapons facilities in Iraq but had no doubt about the existence of programs designed to produce chemical and other weapons of mass destruction, the DIA's director said Friday.

Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, the agency's director, said news reports about excepts from a September 2002 DIA report should not be interpreted as meaning his agency doubted that Iraq had a weapons of mass destruction program.

But he acknowledged that at that time the DIA could not find chemical weapons facilities.

"We could not specifically pin down individual facilities operating as part of the weapons of mass destruction program, specifically the chemical warfare portion," Jacoby said at a joint news conference with Sen. John Warner,and Stephen Cambone, the Pentagon's intelligence chief.

They spoke after the Senate Armed Services Committee met privately with Jacoby, Cambone and an unidentified CIA representative to discuss prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs.

The September 2002 DIA report is notable because it coincided with Bush administration efforts to mount a public case for the urgency of disarming Iraq, by force if necessary. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others argued that Saddam Hussein possessed chemical and biological weapons and was hiding them.

"We do know that the Iraqi regime has chemical and biological weapons," Rumsfeld told the House Armed Services Committee on Sept. 18, 2002.

In his description of the still-classified DIA report, Jacoby drew a distinction between the level of certainty about Iraq's pursuit of weapons and the existence of actual chemical weapons.

"As of 2002, in September, we could not reliably pin down - for somebody who was doing contingency planning - specific facilities, locations or production that was underway at a specific location at that point in time," he said.

That report "is not in any way intended to portray the fact that we had any doubts that such a program existed," he said.

Two months after major fighting in Iraq ended, US officials have yet to find any chemical or other mass-killing weapons, although they still express confidence that some will turn up.

Rumsfeld recently raised the possibility that Iraq destroyed the weapons before the war started March 20. He also has said he believes some remain and will be discovered when US search teams find knowledgeable Iraqis who are willing to disclose the locations.

In making its case for invading Iraq, the administration also argued that Iraq was seeking to develop nuclear weapons and that it might provide some of its mass-killing weapons to terrorists.

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Reaching back to 2001 we have:

Iraq Resumes WMD Activities, New York Times Reports [Carnegie - Jan. 22, 2001]

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Press reports that Iraq has rebuilt chemical and biological weapons plants bombed by the United States in late 1998 present newly-inaugurated President George W. Bush with a serious non-proliferation challenge. A New York Times report that Iraq has rebuilt chemical and biological weapons-capable plants at Falluja demonstrates the continued threat posed to regional stability by Saddam Hussein.

A recently released Department of Defense report "Proliferation: Threat and Response: 2001" stated that Iraq "may have begun program reconstitution" of its chemical and biological weapons capabilities. The news story focuses on alleged development of these weapons at Falluja, an industrial complex west of Baghdad, and specifically mentions production of chlorine and ricin. Chlorine is a dual-use chemical that, if weaponized, is a choking agent that destroys lung tissue. Ricin is a protein toxin produced from castor beans (ricin constitutes approximately 5% of the waste from castor oil production) that causes a variety of symptoms culminating in circulatory and respiratory failure in victims.

The reports and allegations highlight the fact that Iraq continues to block U.N. inspections of its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs, as required by the Gulf War cease-fire. Created by the U.N. Security Council in the aftermath of Iraq's defeat, the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) inspected and dismantled much of Iraq's infrastructure for building WMD. However, its activities took place against a background of increasing Iraqi hostility towards the inspections that culminated with UNSCOM being kicked out of Iraq in December 1998.

In December 1999 the Security Council voted to establish a new U.N. presence in Iraq, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC). By September 2000 UNMOVIC, led by former International Atomic Energy Agency Director Hans Blix, was assembled and prepared to begin inspections. Iraq continues to prevent any inspectors from entering the country, and insists that it has disarmed to the extent called for by U.N. resolutions. With the will of the Security Council to continue sanctions and inspections wavering, UNMOVIC remains in limbo.

In his inaugural address, Bush pledged to do more to confront the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction. Bush's foreign policy advisors have stated both publicly and privately that they wish to shore up flagging international support for economic sanctions on Iraq. Even as the Bush administration forms its Iraq policy, U.S. and British fighters remain on patrol in the no-fly zone, periodically drawing the fire of Iraqi air defense installations as the battle of wills between Washington and Baghdad continues.

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Iraq Rebuilt Weapons Factories, Officials Say 

Source: New York Times
Published: 1/22/01

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Todays news here:

U.S. says more radioactive material than expected found at Iraqi nuclear site

Posted on 06/05/2003 10:50 PM PDT by LdSentinal

WASHINGTON (AP) -- U.S. officials compiling an inventory of a looted Iraqi nuclear site found more radioactive material than they expected, Pentagon officials said Thursday.

It's unclear whether the discovery means the Americans' information was wrong or the Iraqis had moved material to the Tuwaitha site before the war, said three top military and defense officials who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity.

The officials didn't say how much material they expected to be at Tuwaitha or how much more they found.

They said they could not determine if any radioactive material had been stolen from the storage site about 30 miles southeast of Baghdad. Earlier, U.S. officials in Iraq said at least 20 percent of the site's tons of radioactive material was missing.

American forces have collected more than 100 empty metal barrels and five radiological devices by paying $3 bounties for items suspected of having been looted from Tuwaitha, the defense officials said Thursday.

A visit this week by the International Atomic Energy Agency could help clear up the confusion. The IAEA gathered the radioactive material and sealed it at the Tuwaitha storage site after the 1991 Gulf War and has inspected the facility once a year since then. A team of seven IAEA experts is scheduled to begin an assessment at Tuwaitha on Saturday.

The United States had resisted allowing the IAEA officials back into Tuwaitha, which had been the centerpiece of Iraq's nuclear program. Even now, Pentagon officials stress that the IAEA visit is a one-time event to enforce the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, not a weapons inspection that might set a precedent for future U.N. searches for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

American troops and weapons experts will accompany the IAEA officials wherever they go, an arrangement the Pentagon officials said was for safety.

Before the war, IAEA inspectors concluded Iraq didn't have an active nuclear weapons program -- a finding U.S. leaders blame in part for their failure to win broader international support for the war.

The tensions with the IAEA come amid persistent questions about the U.S. hunt for evidence of the nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs President Bush said he went to war to eliminate. No such weapons of mass destruction have been found, although Bush says the discovery of two trailers crammed with germ-growing equipment proves Iraq had a biological weapons program.

American forces have visited all but a handful of the 20 to 30 other storage sites for radioactive materials in Iraq, but have no plans to allow the IAEA to visit them, U.S. officials said.

Tuwaitha obviously had been picked over by thieves. The fence and 12-foot concrete wall around the three storage buildings for radioactive material had huge gaps and U.S. Marines found the main gate open when they arrived April 7.

Inside, some radioactive material had been scattered around. Radioactivity measurements inside the three buildings found levels two to ten times background levels, a senior U.S. military official in Baghdad said, joining the news briefing via a satellite link.

Local Iraqis have told the Americans that Iraqi soldiers guarding Tuwaitha left on March 10, before the war started, and civilian guards abandoned the site March 20, the day before American ground forces entered Iraq from Kuwait.

Although reporters saw looters inside the radioactive material storage site after the Americans arrived, the defense officials said Thursday they had no evidence of any looting there after April 7. Other looters have been captured elsewhere on the sprawling, 23,000-acre Tuwaitha site, however, they said.

The looting has raised the possibility that terrorist groups could have obtained material for a radiological "dirty bomb" from the site. None of the material at Tuwaitha was of high enough quality to make a nuclear bomb.

Most of the uranium stored at the site is "yellow cake," a slightly processed form of uranium ore the color and consistency of yellow corn meal. Some low-enriched uranium also is stored at the site -- uranium processed to enhance the percentage of the element's isotope that is most useful for nuclear reactor fuel and weapons. That material is not the highly enriched uranium needed for a nuclear bomb.

Some people in the villages surrounding the Tuwaitha site have complained of health problems they blame on radiation exposure. At least some of the barrels looted from the site -- which had been used to store uranium -- were emptied and used to store drinking water.

None of the people who turned in the contraband showed more than background levels of radiation, the military officials said. And none of the equipment was emitting more radiation than slightly above background levels.

The five devices recovered by American forces included measuring equipment and other industrial gear which uses radioactive material such as cesium-137, a military officials said. He said that American officials couldn't be sure all of the recovered material was from Tuwaitha because some of it was unmarked and some had markings obscured.

The Pentagon is sending a medical team to the area to investigate any health effects of the looting.

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And we have a transcript here:

IRAQ: Was Intelligence on the Search for Weapons of Mass Destruction Politicized?

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IRAQ: Was Intelligence on the Search for Weapons of Mass Destruction Politicized?
Fox News ^ | June 3, 2003 | Brit Hume interview of BILL GERTZ,

Posted on 06/06/2003 5:03 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach

Was Intelligence on the Search for Weapons of Mass Destruction Politicized?

Wednesday, June 04, 2003

This is a partial transcript of Special Report with Brit Hume, June 3, that has been edited for clarity. Click here to order the complete transcript.

Watch Special Report With Brit Hume weeknights at 6 p.m. ET

BRIT HUME, HOST: That report that Carl just noted on the CIA's latest assessment of Al Qaeda (search) was written by the Washington Times national security correspondent Bill Gertz, renowned in this city for his contacts inside the American intelligence services. His latest book, by the way, is Breakdown; subtitled How America's Intelligence Failures Led to September 11 . Bill Gertz joins me now.

Welcome to you, sir.

BILL GERTZ, AUTHOR, BREAKDOWN: Good to be with you.

HUME: Weigh in for me, if you will, on this whole controversy about the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction (search). You're hearing sort of tentative expressions of interest from Democrats. But it's much more aggressive than that in Britain and in Europe where you're hearing out right charges of falsification, lying by British and American leaders on this. You know the intelligence services. You must know something about the intelligence. What do you know?

GERTZ: Well, the issue is whether or not intelligence was politicized. That's usually what they say. And of course, it's politicized. Anytime that you make public information that you use for political purpose, it's politicization.

And that happened in February when Secretary of State Colin Powell (search) made his case. They decided they were going to release classified information on this and they made the case. They had good, solid information based on defectors, based on intercepts.

The question then is, well, where are these weapons? Not so much whether the intelligence was right, but what happened to them? There are reports that they've been moved out of Iraq. There are reports they could have destroyed them and, of course...

HUME: How credible?

GERTZ: Well, I think that there is probably something to that. There's reports that they may be in Syria, the Baca Valley in Lebanon or even as far as Libya. They also could have dumped them. And then again, I think it is going to take a minimum of six months before they can get to the bottom of whether or not they're still there.

HUME: Let me take you back to the question of politicization. Normally when you hear about politicization of intelligence, the unmistakable implication is that the intelligence is being distorted for political purposes. Is that what you're saying?

GERTZ: Well, I'm saying that policymakers use intelligence to make a political case. That's what I meant by that. Of course, the intelligence people will deny that they have anything to do with politicization. But you know, this is the idea that they're totally objective and just telling it like it is also somewhat of a myth within the intelligence circles.

HUME: You mean because intelligence agents themselves, as they're preparing reports, have a viewpoint they're trying to support.

GERTZ: Absolutely. And they're serving a consumer and they're not going to serve up stories to the consumer that's not going to help their career.

HUME: Well, I understand. But let's talk about this. Were you suspicious now that the intelligence on the existence on these weapons of mass destruction and their -- and the imminent threat that they posed to the United States and its allies was deliberately overdrawn by intelligence agents?

GERTZ: I don't think that it was deliberately overdrawn. I think that they saw that this was a good vehicle to make a public case and I think it was important to the administration to make a public case. I think they took information. We've all heard the stories about the secretary of state throwing some of information...

HUME: Let me stop you and ask you about that; because I think it's U.S. News & World Report had a report over the weekend that said basically that when the secretary was preparing to make the speech at the U.N., that you just mentioned a short time ago, he had a ream of material that was submitted to him. And a lot of it he flat discarded as being stuff that he wasn't confident enough to go with. And the suggestion in the story was that the vice president's office had tried to kind of pawn this stuff off on him. What do you know about that?

GERTZ: Well, I think he's already talked about this in several interviews over the last couple of days. He did admit that there was some information that he felt was not corroborated properly. And his point was he wanted to make you know, what we in the news business call a bulletproof case in front of the U.N. That is, they didn't want anybody shooting holes in his story.

I think he made add very convincing case. For example, on the issue of the biological vans, he talked about multiple sources. He talked about defectors who were actually involved in conducting tests with these mobile- biological weapons vans. They had intercepts; they played intercepts where Iraqis were talking about how to deceive inspectors.

Again, this is an unfolding story, but my guess is within the next several months, we're going to find more than just a few vans.

HUME: And your sense is we'll find what; the actual weapons themselves, the substances or what?

GERTZ: Or we'll find the remnants of what's left of them.

HUME: In other words, we'll find that it was destroyed somehow or...

GERTZ: Or moved. Yes.

HUME: Right. And what would be your best guess on which it will be?

GERTZ: I think we're going to find actual weapons. Now you take anthrax, we know that he has anywhere from 7,000 liters of anthrax...

HUME: Or had.

GERTZ: ... or up to 20,000 liters.

HUME: That's what the U.N. believes he had, right?

GERTZ: You figure what a liter of anthrax looks like, it is not a large -- it is not something that is going to be filling up a tractor- trailer. It is a very small amount. So, this is going to be a very serious hunt.

Also, the team that were in Iraq up until just recently, they were combat support teams. The teams that are going through now are intelligence people that are actually going to do the real searching.

HUME: So your sense is that the real search is really now getting underway?

GERTZ: Yes. They just dispatched a one-star general who is heading up that team.

HUME: Bill Gertz, nice to have you. Thanks very much.

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New item here :

Admit your lies: Former UN inspector tells Bush, Blair (Scott Ritter Alert)