Posted on 07/09/2004 9:55:49 AM PDT by usmc1775
The key U.S. assertions leading to the 2003 invasion of Iraq — that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons and was working to make nuclear weapons — were wrong and based on false or overstated CIA analyses, a scathing Senate Intelligence Committee report asserted Friday.
Intelligence analysts fell victim to "group think" assumptions that Iraq had weapons that it did not, the bipartisan report concluded. Many factors contributing to those failures are ongoing problems within the U.S. intelligence community — which cannot be fixed with more money alone, it said.
Sen. Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican who heads the committee, told reporters that assessments that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and could make a nuclear weapon by the end of the decade were wrong.
"As the report will show, they were also unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available intelligence," he said.
"This was a global intelligence failure."
Intelligence analysts worked from the assumption that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and was seeking to make more, as well as trying to revive a nuclear weapons program. Instead, investigations after the Iraq invasion have shown that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had no nuclear weapons program and no biological weapons, and only small amounts of chemical weapons have been found.
Analysts ignored or discounted conflicting information because of their assumptions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the report said.
(Excerpt) Read more at story.news.yahoo.com ...
Wow...I guess all these other people are lying, then:
Both Duelfer and Kay found Iraq had "a clandestine network of laboratories and safe houses with equipment that was suitable to continuing its prohibited chemica-and biological-weapons [BW] programs," Among Kay's "ignored" disclosures, were these:
** Equipment for "uranium-enrichment centrifuges" whose only plausible use was as part of a clandestine nuclear-weapons program. In all these cases, "Iraqi scientists had been told before the war not to declare their activities to the U.N. inspectors,"
** A prison laboratory complex that may have been used for human testing of BW agents and "that Iraqi officials working to prepare the U.N. inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the U.N." Why was Saddam interested in testing biological-warfare agents on humans if he didn't have a biological-weapons program?
** "Reference strains" of a wide variety of biological-weapons agents were found beneath the sink in the home of a prominent Iraqi BW scientist. "We thought it was a big deal," a senior administration official said. "But it has been written off [by the press] as a sort of 'starter set.'"
** New (emphasize, new) research on BW-applicable agents, brucella and Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever, and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin that were not declared to the United Nations.
** A line of unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs, or drones, "not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500 kilometers [311 miles], 350 kilometers [217 miles] beyond the permissible limit."
** "Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited Scud-variant missiles, a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists have said they were told to conceal from the U.N."
** "Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1,000 kilometers [621 miles] -- well beyond the 150-kilometer-range limit [93 miles] imposed by the U.N. Missiles of a 1,000-kilometer range would have allowed Iraq to threaten targets throughout the Middle East, including Ankara [Turkey], Cairo [Egypt] and Abu Dhabi [United Arab Emirates]."
In addition, through interviews with Iraqi scientists, seized documents and other evidence, the ISG learned the Iraqi government had made "clandestine attempts between late 1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to 1,300-kilometer-range [807 miles] ballistic missiles -- probably the No Dong -- 300-kilometer-range [186 miles] antiship cruise missiles and other prohibited military equipment."
In testimony before Congress on March 30, Duelfer, revealed the ISG had found evidence of a "crash program" to construct new plants capable of making chemical...and biological/warfare agents. The ISG also found a previously undeclared program to build a "high-speed rail gun," a device apparently designed for testing nuclear-weapons materials.
That came in addition to 500 tons of natural uranium stockpiled at Iraq's main declared nuclear site south of Baghdad, which International Atomic Energy Agency spokesman Mark Gwozdecky acknowledged to Insight had been intended for "a clandestine nuclear-weapons program."
Also ignored was Kay's statment relating to exactly were some of these WMDs may have gone. David Kay confirmed that part of Saddam's weapons were hidden in Syria: "We are not talking about a large stockpile of weapons, 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 program,"
Kay's revelation has now been further confirmed by Demetrius Perricos, acting chairman of UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), who recently disclosed that his inspectors have been busily tracking shipments of illicit Iraqi WMD components around the world.
The Associated Press announced that UNMOVIC inspectors have found dozens of engines from banned al-Samoud 2 (SA2) missiles, which were shipped out of Iraq as "scrap metal." Most recently, UNMOVIC agents found 20 SA-2 engines in Jordan, along with a great deal of other WMD materials. Officials discovered an identical engine in a Rotterdam port in the Netherlands and believe as many as a dozen extra SA-2 missile engines alone have been transported out of Iraq and remain unaccounted for...
Besides the SA-2 engines, inspectors also found Iraqi "dual use" technology in Jordan, items purportedly employed in civilian affairs that can be used to create or enhance deadly weapons systems. The New York Times noted that among those items were "fermenters, a freeze drier, distillation columns, parts of missiles and a reactor vessel - all tools suitable for making biological or chemical weapons."
UN spokesman Ewen Buchanan put the threat of "dual use" technology into perspective. "You can make all kinds of pharmaceutical and medicinal products with a fermenter," Buchanan said. "You can also use it to breed anthrax."
Before the war, Saddam's regime cast its possession of "dual use" materials in the most innocent light, a ruse familiar to students of the Cold War. UNMOVIC wisely rejected his sunny assessment.
As Reuter's reported..."A number of sites which contained dual-use equipment that was previously monitored by UN inspectors has [sic.] been systematically taken apart,' said Ewen Buchanan, spokesman for the New York-based inspectors. 'The question this raises is what happened to equipment known to have been there. 'Where is it now? It's a concern,' Buchanan asked. "...The report said the U.N. inspectors also found papers showing illegal contracts by Iraq for a missile guidance system, laser ring gyroscopes and a variety of production and testing equipment not previously disclosed.
Many of the "dual use" components UNMOVIC found in foreign ports had been previous tagged by UN inspectors in Iraq before the war. And transfers are taking place rapidly. During his presentation, Perricos showed the Security Council a picture of a fully developed missile site in May 2003 that had been entirely torn down by February of this year.
Perricos' June 9 testimony is made all the more credible by the fact that he is hardly a neo-con stalwart. USA Today described his mindset just three months ago: "Demetrius Perricos, acting head of the United Nations weapons inspection program, can't disguise his satisfaction that almost a year after the invasion of Iraq, U.S. inspectors have found the same thing that their much-maligned UN counterparts did before the war: no banned weapons." Today, Perricos' smile has disappeared.
All these revelations came during a closed meeting of the UN Security Council held on June 9. However, the investigations are not new. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) launched its own probe into Iraqi WMD transfers a full six months ago, when a Dutch scrap metal company discovered [five pounds of yellowcake uranium ore] in Rotterdam. The sample was shipped from Jordan but Jordanian officials said the metal originated in Iraq. (Perhaps this is the yellowcake that atomic sleuth Amb. Joe Wilson insisted Iraq never purchased from Niger...which in fact, has now been re-confirmed by the London Financial Times). Even the once skeptical IAEA Director Mohammed El Baradei warned two months ago that evidence of Saddam's WMDs is being shipped abroad.
Jordan has been the recipient of Iraqi WMDs in the past. Most recently, Jordan seized 20 tons of chemical weapons while foiling an al-Qaeda plot to kill 80,000 people. The stockpile they uncovered contained 70 different kinds of chemical agents, including Sarin and VX gas. (Remember, last month Iraqi insurgents lobbed two chemical weapons at U.S. troops armed with Sarin and mustard gas. Add the Polish contingents discovery of at least another 17 "prohibited" shells that preliminarily tested positive for Sarin, and it is obvious that Saddam was "at least" in clear violation of a number of UN resolutions.)
On April 17, Jordanian King Abdallah claimed these poisons came from Syria – but experts say Syria only has the capacity to produce small amounts of these weapons, not the 20 tons al-Qaeda possessed. Significantly, David Kay and others have said Syria acted as a depository for Saddam's WMDs. Former Justice Department official John Loftus has made a compelling case that even more WMDs are presently buried in Syria. And these are merely the latest in a long line of WMD discoveries, inside Iraq and out.
You are not making sense.
Nothing in this report is new news. We had David Kay in January and Congress wrining hands over 'faulty intel' etc. ... and that was before we found sarin gas in EIDs, more shells wit cyclosarin, etc. We already have had Howard Dean, Moore, and other fanatics saying "Bush lied" for a year now. (They are the ones lying, but that is another matter.) If incorrect pre-war intel is laid at CIA, it doesnt help the Pres. but wont hurt him more than he has already been, since this NEWS IS ALREADY BEEN OUT THERE.
This is just Senate CYA blaming others for a general (and understandable) gap in knowledge about Saddam's secret programs.
What this is NOT is any more proof of "No WMD" thesis.
The "No WMD" thesis gets more disproven with each (non-media-covered) discovery of banned weapons.
You are absolutley right. While I haven't seen this report, yet...I did hear Jay Rock. say that if he had known then, what he knows now, he and others never would've voted for this war. It was disgusting...especially when we have the UN and even the PM of Canada admitting that Saddam's WMD's left the country before and during the war.
Great data points.
The real question is whether the senate report will acknowledge this.
whew. I am just a housewife. I really thought that's what I was picking up from the whole thing. I feel a little better. PLUS, the misleading thread title correction is calming me down... some.
Last night I read that Bush is going to be giving a speech from Oak Ridge on Monday.
Yes, you get it and I get it but the Bush haters in the general populace will latch on to this Senate Intelligence Committee report (the headlines, mind you) with the fervor of a rabid dog to validate their beliefs. This could very well sway the swing voters to Kerry.
Those statements by Senator Roberts are assinine. How long did it take us to make a nuclear weapon? Of course, Iraq could have made one in ten years time.
Based upon the evidence, the US Senate is full of pompous ostriches.
ooops, I meant FBI files to bed with her. I'm not sure anybody knows exactly who she beds with.
Thanks for that info...must mean something is up.
My point on political implications is this:
The Bush-haters have *already* got all the 'evidence' they need to hate Bush, it's come out of the NYTimes, Moore's movie, Howad Dean, lots of books, etc.
I know. I've been seeing the "Noone died when Clinton lied" t-shirts. When did the "Bush lied, thousands died" meme start? About 4 weeks after we liberated Baghdad? It's out there already.
As for headlines, NYTimes did 33 *straight days* of Abu Graib front-page stories, each one hitting on Bush admin for faulty behavior, trying to link the 'chain of command'.
I dont think how this could be worse.
See post #21:
"Russian-made R-60, NATO AA-8 Aphid, air-to-air missiles were found..
The Russian-made missiles are >6 feet long. Each carries 3.5 pounds of uranium.
wrapped around a high explosive warhead (13.2-pound) making a possible "dirty bomb"."
Iraq had TONS of enriched uranium. Yes, there nuclear program was defunct, but the missiles mentioned in post #21 plus nuclear material would be enough for a very deadly 'dirty bomb'.
This could have been given to a terrorist group, shipped clandestinely to any city and 'poof' - thousands dead.
It would make Madrid 3/11 seem a picnic and give 9/11 second-billing.
No WMD threat? .... WRONG.
Rumors heard about Donna Shalala.
What about the massive truck convoys to Syria and Lebanon's Bekaa Valley in the run-up to the war? I can't believe we don't have sat pics of what went on, and those weren't made available to the senate idiots and morons.
Welcome to FR, btw.
I keep hearing all these stories about uranium being shipped out of Iraq before and during the war. I must have been asleep at the wheel the last week, I completely missed that story. Does anyone have a link to that?
I'm slipping in my old age.
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