With Malice Toward Cheney

If you want to witness a massacre on television, take at look at this debate on MSNBC’s Morning Joe between Joe Scarborough and Lawrence O’Donnell over Dick Cheney, Iraq, and weapons of mass destruction. Scarborough uses an avalanche of facts to bury O’Donnell’s contention that Dick Cheney lied about WMD and based the case for war on a “wild guess.”

In addition to all the sources Scarborough cited and who claimed Saddam Hussein possessed WMD — including leading Democrats like Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, John Edwards, and more — you could add the intelligence agencies of virtually every nation in the world, including those who opposed the Iraq War.

As for O’Donnell’s assertion that none of the members of Congress Scarborough mentioned had access to the information Dick Cheney had: It is simply false. Mr. O’Donnell may be unfamiliar with something called the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which is considered the authoritative judgment of the intelligence community. The NIE that was produced in October 2002 was available to every member of Congress — and among its key findings was this:

We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions. If left unchecked it probably will have a nuclear weapon within this decade.

As Factcheck.org put it, “The NIE . . . says pretty much what Bush and his aides were saying about Iraq’s weapons.”

The Washington Post pointed out what should have been obvious to O’Donnell: “Congress was entitled to view the 92-page National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq before the October 2002 vote.”

In addition, both the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a report adopted unanimously by both Republican and Democratic members, as well as the so-called Silberman-Robb report found (in the words of the latter), “no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community’s pre-war assessment of Iraq’s weapons program.”

In other words, Lawrence O’Donnell is thoroughly ignorant; the charges he made were completely and demonstrably false. And they were clearly driven by malice. For Joe Scarborough to have publicly exposed such an angry ideologue was a public service. And for Lawrence O’Donnell, it was a public embarrassment.

The Left insisted that we solve the Saddam and Iraq problems with other world leaders via the United Nations.

Yes the same organization involved in the Oil for Food scandal.

What exactly did the U.N. do to stop Saddam in the past?

Resolution 1441: “United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441 is a resolution by the UN Security Council, passed unanimously on November 8, 2002, offering Iraq “a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations” that had been set out in several previous resolutions (Resolution 660, Resolution 661, Resolution 678, Resolution 686, Resolution 687, Resolution 688, Resolution 707, Resolution 715, Resolution 986, and Resolution 1284), notably to provide “an accurate full, final, and complete disclosure, as required by Resolution 687 (1991), of all aspects of its programs to develop weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles”. Resolution 1441 threatens “serious consequences” if these are not met. It reasserted demands that UN weapons inspectors should have “immediate, unconditional, and unrestricted access” to sites of their choosing, in order to ascertain compliance.”

A lot of resolutions with no action or consequence.

From my files:

On June 9th [2004], the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission briefed the Security Council about the export of Iraqi WMD, missile and nuclear components shipped out of Iraq before, during and after the invasion. As reported by MENL news service, UNMOVIC acting executive chairman Demetrius Perricos told the Council, "The removal of these materials from Iraq raises concerns with regard to proliferation risks," and said inspectors found Iraqi WMD and missile components shipped abroad that still contained UN inspection tags.

The World Tribune reported on Perricos's briefing. "He said the Iraqi facilities were dismantled and sent both to Europe and around the Middle East at the rate of about 1,000 tons of metal a month... The Baghdad missile site contained a range of WMD and dual-use components, UN officials said. They included missile components, reactor vessel and fermenters ... required for the production of chemical and biological warheads. 'It raises the question of what happened to the dual-use equipment, where is it now and what is it being used for,' Perricos's spokesman, said. 'You can make all kinds of pharmaceutical and medicinal products with a fermenter. You can also use it to breed anthrax.'"

Source

As discussed in Shadow Warriors by Kenneth Timmerman, Smeshko and the other Ukrainians informed the U.S. and British governments that Iraq’s WMD had been sent outside of the country with Russian assistance. The information included the dates and locations of meetings to plan the operation, and even names of the Russian Spetsnaz officers involved. Shaw also worked with a British solider of fortune who ran an intelligence network in the region, and had tracked the movement of WMDs to Syria and Lebanon. The information provided by this network substantiated the information provided by the Ukrainians. Ion Pacepa, the former head of Romanian intelligence during the Cold War, has also provided information supporting these allegations, saying he had personal knowledge of a Soviet plan called “Operation Sarindar” where the Russians would cleanse an ally, such as Iraq, of traces of illicit activity if threatened with Western attack. The plan’s purpose was to deny the West of any evidence incriminating the Russian ally, as well as to wipe Russia’s own fingerprints off of the state’s illegal activity.

The Other Intelligence Failure: Iraqi WMD Tips Were Ignored

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, said vehicle traffic photographed by U.S. spy satellites indicated that material and documents related to the arms programs were shipped to Syria."

Source

"Last month Moshe Yaalon, who was Israel's top general at the time, said Iraq transported WMD to Syria six weeks before Operation Iraqi Freedom began.

Last March, John A. Shaw, a former U.S. deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said Russian Spetsnaz units moved WMD to Syria and Lebanon's Bekaa Valley.

"While in Iraq I received information from several sources naming the exact Russian units, what they took and where they took both WMD materials and conventional explosives," Mr. Shaw told NewsMax reporter Charles Smith.

Retired Marine Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong was deputy commander of Central Command during Operation Iraqi Freedom. In September 2004, he told WABC radio that "I do know for a fact that some of those weapons went into Syria, Lebanon and Iran."

In January 2004, David Kay, the first head of the Iraq Survey Group which conducted the search for Saddam's WMD, told a British newspaper there was evidence unspecified materials had been moved to Syria from Iraq shortly before the war.

"We know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam's WMD program," Mr. Kay told the Sunday Telegraph.

Also that month, Nizar Nayuf, a Syrian journalist who defected to an undisclosed European country, told a Dutch newspaper he knew of three sites where Iraq's WMD was being kept. They were the town of al Baida near the city of Hama in northern Syria; the Syrian air force base near the village of Tal Snan, and the city of Sjinsar on the border with Lebanon.

In an addendum to his final report last April, Charles Duelfer, who succeeded David Kay as head of the Iraq Survey Group, said he couldn't rule out a transfer of WMD from Iraq to Syria.

"There was evidence of a discussion of possible WMD collaboration initiated by a Syrian security officer, and ISG received information about movement of material out of Iraq, including the possibility that WMD was involved. In the judgment of the working group, these reports were sufficiently credible to merit further investigation," Mr. Duelfer said."

Source

"The short answer to the question of where the WMD Saddam bought from the Russians went was that they went to Syria and Lebanon," former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense John A. Shaw told an audience Saturday at a privately sponsored "Intelligence Summit" in Alexandria, Va. (www.intelligencesummit.org).

Source

"We are not talking about a large stockpile of weapons," he said. "But we know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam's WMD programme. Precisely what went to Syria, and what has happened to it, is a major issue that needs to be resolved."

Source

"Two days before the war, on March 17th, we saw through multiple intelligence channels - both human intelligence and technical (satellite,eavesdrop) intelligence - large caravans of people and things, including some of the top 55 Iraqis, going to Syria."

Source