LYNSEY ADDARIO/CORBIS FOR TIME
Soldiers of the 25th Infantry rummage through a bombed-out house in Mosel looking for weapons
Posted on 06/01/2003 9:01:13 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Weapons of Mass Disappearance
The war in Iraq was based largely on intelligence about banned arms that still haven't been found. Was America's spy craft wrong — or manipulated?
LYNSEY ADDARIO/CORBIS FOR TIME Soldiers of the 25th Infantry rummage through a bombed-out house in Mosel looking for weapons |
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Sunday, Jun. 01, 2003
How do take your country to war when it doesn't really want to go? You could subcontract with another nation, fight on the sly and hope no one notices. But if you need a lot of troops to prevail and you would like to remind everyone in the neighborhood who's boss anyway, then what you need most is a good reason — something to stir up the folks back home.
As the U.S. prepared to go to war in Iraq last winter, the most compelling reason advanced by George W. Bush to justify a new kind of pre-emptive war was that Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear, chemical and biological arms — weapons of mass destruction (wmd). "There's no doubt in my mind but that they currently have chemical and biological weapons," said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in January. "We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons," said Vice President Dick Cheney in March. That Iraq might have WMD was never the only reason the Bush Administration wanted to topple Saddam. But it was the big reason, the casus belli, the public rationale peddled over and over to persuade a skeptical nation, suspicious allies and a hostile United Nations to get behind the controversial invasion. And while that sales pitch fell flat overseas, it worked better than expected at home: by late March, 77% of the public felt that invading U.S. troops would find WMD.
But eight weeks after the war's end, most of that confident intelligence has yet to pan out, and a growing number of experts think it never will. Current and former U.S. officials have begun to question whether the weapons will ever be found in anything like the quantities the U.S. suggested before the war — if found at all — and whether the U.S. gamed the intelligence to justify the invasion. For now, WMD seems to stand for weapons of mass disappearance. Smarting from the accusations that they had cooked the books, top U.S. officials fanned out late last week to say the hunt would go on and the weapons would eventually be found. CIA officials told TIME that they would produce a round of fresh evidence for increasingly wary lawmakers as early as next week. After dispatching dozens of G.I. patrols to some 300 suspected WMD sites in Iraq over the past two months, only to come up empty-handed, the Pentagon announced last week that it will shift from hunting for banned weapons to hunting for documents and people who might be able to say where banned weapons are — or were. But it is clear that the U.S. is running out of good leads. "We've been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad," Lieut. General James T. Conway, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said last week. "But they're simply not there."
Wherever they are, the missing weapons are beginning to cause trouble elsewhere. Overseas, British Prime Minister Tony Blair is under fire from critics for overstating the case for war. The accusations came at an awkward moment for Bush, as he began a seven-day diplomatic trip to smooth over relations in Europe and seek peace in the Middle East. Moreover, mistrust about the Iraqi intelligence was growing just as the Administration began to make a similar case against Iran. In order to defend the credibility of his agency, CIA Director George Tenet took the unusual step of issuing a statement last Friday dismissing suggestions that the CIA politicized its intelligence. "Our role is to call it like we see it, to tell policymakers what we know, what we don't know, what we think and what we base it on. That's the code we live by." Asked to translate, an intelligence official explained that if there was a breakdown on the Bush team, it wasn't at the agency. "There's one issue in terms of collecting and analyzing intelligence," he said. "Another issue is what policymakers do with that information. That's their prerogative."
One of the oldest secrets of the secret world is that intelligence work involves as much art as science. While it is difficult, dangerous and expensive to snoop on our enemies with satellite cameras, hidden bugs and old-fashioned dead drops, knowing what all that information really means is the true skill of intelligence work. The information is often so disparate and scattershot that it amounts to little without interpretation.
And interpretation has long been the speciality of the hard-liners who fill so many key foreign-policy posts in the Bush Administration. Unlike his father, who ran the CIA briefly in the mid-'70s and prided himself on revitalizing an embattled spy corps, George W. Bush dotted his foreign-policy team with people who have waged a private war with the CIA for years, men who are disdainful of the way the agency gathers secrets — and what it makes of them. Working mainly out of the Pentagon, the hard-liners have long believed that America's spy agency was a complacent captive of the two parties' internationalist wings, too wary and risk averse, too reliant on gadgets and too slow to see enemies poised to strike.
Two Bush aides in particular, Rumsfeld and his Pentagon deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, have a long record of questioning the assumptions, methods and conclusions of the cia. Wolfowitz was a member of the famous B Team, created in the mid-'70s by the cia, then headed by Bush's father, to double-check the work of the cia's line analysts about the military strength of the Soviet Union. Filled with many hard-liners who now work in the younger Bush's Administration, the B Team was spoiling back then for bigger defense budgets and a more aggressive foreign policy. It found many of the cia's conclusions about the Soviet Union softheaded and naive. Its final report helped launch the Reagan-era defense buildup of the 1980s. Rumsfeld also chaired a bipartisan commission in 1998 set up by Congress to assess the pace of rogue states' missile efforts, which concluded that the cia wouldn't be able to gather intelligence quickly enough to meet the unseen threats posed by Iran, Iraq and North Korea. That dire prediction — reinforced by a North Korean missile launch a month later — turbocharged the nation's push to build a $100 billion missile shield, now under construction.
The hard-liners' staunch beliefs were powerfully bolstered after 9/11; they quickly concluded that the CIA failed to anticipate the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. And they were not reassured by the CIA's performance after 9/11 either. By last fall, Rumsfeld had grown so impatient with the CIA's equivocal explanations of the Iraq problem that he set up his own mini-CIA at the Pentagon called the Office of Special Plans. It was hatched and designed, as a former U.S. official puts it, to get "the intelligence he wanted."
Several current and former military officers who saw all the relevant data through this spring charge that the Pentagon took the raw data from the CIA and consistently overinterpreted the threat posed by Iraq's stockpiles. "There was a predisposition in this Administration to assume the worst about Saddam," a senior military officer told Time. This official, recently retired, was deeply involved in planning the war with Iraq but left the service after concluding that the U.S. was going to war based on bum intelligence. "They were inclined to see and interpret evidence a particular way to support a very deeply held conviction," the officer says. "I just think they felt there needed to be some sort of rallying point for the American people. I think they said it sincerely, but I also think that at the end of the day, we'll find out their interpretations of the intelligence were wrong." Another official, an Army intelligence officer, singled out Rumsfeld for massaging the facts. "Rumsfeld was deeply, almost pathologically distorting the intelligence," says the officer. Rumsfeld told a radio audience last week that the "war was not waged under any false pretense." And an aide flat-out rejects the idea that intelligence was hyped to support the invasion. "We'd disagree very strongly with that," said Victoria Clarke, the chief Pentagon spokeswoman.
Over the past two weeks, TIME has interviewed several dozen current and former intelligence officials and experts at the Pentagon and cia and on Capitol Hill to try to understand how the public version of the intelligence got so far ahead of the evidence. The reporting suggests that from the start the process was more deductive than empirical. According to these officials, three factors were at work:
But if the Bush team overreached, one nagging question is, Why? A defense expert who has spent 20 years watching Republicans argue about foreign policy from the inside believes the hard-liners' agenda isn't about Iraq or even oil. It's simply that the most zealous defenders of America's role in the world are congenitally disposed to overreact to every threat — which leads them to read too much into the intelligence. "They came in with a world view, and they looked for things to fit into it," says Lawrence Korb, who served in the Reagan Pentagon and now works at the Council on Foreign Relations. "If you hadn't had 9/11, they would be doing the same things to China."
The U.S. does appear to have one solid argument on its side: those mysterious mobile biowarfare labs. The cia shared its findings with reporters last week about two tractor-trailer trucks seized in Iraq that it claims were designed for the production of biological weapons. The agency published a nine-page white paper on its website about the mobile labs — allegations that are very similar to charges made by Secretary of State Colin Powell in his U.N. speech on Feb. 5. President Bush pointed to the trucks last week as the best evidence yet that the intelligence wasn't overheated. And en route to Europe, Powell ventured to the back of Air Force One and explained to reporters a bit more about how the U.S. learned of the vans' purpose. "We didn't just make them up one night. Those were eyewitness accounts of people who had worked in the program and knew it was going on, multiple accounts." Powell sarcastically dismissed alternative explanations: "'Oh, it was a hydrogen-making thing for balloons.' No. There's no question in my mind what it was designed for." But even Powell acknowledged that there were no signs of pathogens in the trucks. Top U.S. officials believe the missing weapons are so well hidden that it will take months or perhaps years to find them — an explanation that has the added virtue of giving them a lot more time. G.I.s have searched only about a third of the 900 suspected sites across the Iraqi countryside. Even the Administration's positions are in flux. Saddam, according to Rumsfeld, could have destroyed the weapons right before the war or even moved them out of the country. "I don't know the answer," Rumsfeld said last week, "and I suspect we'll find out a lot more information as we go along and keep interrogating people."
After a war, the victors always write the history, and that means they can rewrite the war's causes. Even without wmd, the mass graves discovered in Iraq prove that Saddam was a despot worthy of toppling. For many — including some in the Administration — that did not seem a sufficient reason to launch the last war. But until the missing weapons are found, it could be a long time before an American President will be able to rely on his interpretation of intelligence data to launch another war.
-- REPORTED BY PERRY BACON JR., TIMOTHY J. BURGER, JAMES CARNEY, JOHN F. DICKERSON AND MARK THOMPSON/WASHINGTON AND J.F.O. MCALLISTER/LONDON
If someone pointed an UNLOADED gun at you, wouldn't you make the assumption that it had bullets in it? Wouldn't it be in your best interest to error on the side of caution? By not PROVING he had no WMD, he was pointing a gun at the US. We had to assume it had bullets in it. He gave us no other choice.
Now THAT is an absolute lie.
The actual official US military aid given to Iraq and sanctioned by our government was satellite intelligence. This was at a time when it was feared Iran was going to overrun Iraq completely.
Now what you're referring to (and greatly inflating) were the anthrax cultures we sent them.
That wasn't even a high-level Govt. decision (Reagan wasn't sitting around saying "Hey, lets send the Iraqis some Anthrax!) At that time, labs researching animal diseases and whatnot would routinely send anything to anybody at any other lab in the world who also wanted to research the same cultures. There was no governmental oversight at all, really.
And Iraq never used bioweapons against Iran (or anybody, for that matter.)
More lies about America's committment, here. Why do you rally around America's capabilities using UN sanctions as an excuse?
"When the UN wasn't granted full access to Iraq, it's not a stretch to assume there was something to hide." -- Peach
Bush & Blair know nothing aside from what their respective intelligence agencies tell them. Invoking the names of Bush & Blair is a distraction from the actual source of misinformation (whether by accident or design) which is the intelligence agencies.
The UN Security Council did not say that Iraq had WMDs. What the UN Security Council said was that Iraq was know to have had WMDs and had not established that it no longer had them.
The CIA evidence was clearly false - again, whether by accident or design is an open question. In an earlier post, you invoked Powell's (now clearly refuted) testimony to the United Nations. I don't need to go back & look at the satellite images Powell presented. Do you know why? Because those facilities are now under our control and if there was any evidence of WMDs there, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
I don't know what "authors of hundreds of books" you're talking about, but whenever you bring that up you seem to be referring to Iraq having chemical arms during the Iran-Iraq War and the Kurdish uprisings. Newsflash: that was two decades ago..
Finally, I have no doubt whatsoever that the people at the History Channel or the Discovery Channel could lie to me. Especially since the History Channel has aired lies in the past (Moon Hoax and UFO stories). Again, though, you seem to be fixated on two decades ago since that's what the programs you've mentioned were about.
Seeing a quarter of a million troops gathering on his border gave Saddam a sure indication we weren't kidding around. His military was descimated from the Gulf War in '91. He knew he couldn't win. Yet he didn't stop the war by opening his doors to the UN. Why do you think that was?
Yes. Even a tiny little back room drug lab can be detected years after it's existance ended. You couldn't possibly get rid of all evidence of manufacturing and possessing the quantities we were led to believe he had without lots of left over evidence. Evidence that should be eaasy to find with Saddams' absence (like the tens of thousands of people that would have had to know about it and handle it and be trained to use it on the battlefield, for instance)
BTW, the History and Discovery channels dealt with what years? 2002, 2003? Or a much earlier time? Everyone knows he had the stuff, and used it back during the Iran war and Kurd uprising period. We helped him develop it from what I understand. The question is did he have these HUGE quantities after 9/11, when we started going after him and using his alleged giant WMD warfare preparations as justfication . If so: Where's the proof? That's all Im looking for, just the proof. Proof that should be everywhere, but seems (so far) to be nowhere.
If we've got the evidence, we need to show it now. There is no reason to keep it secret. Keeping is secret is just generating increasing doubtfulness among the worlds' people, even myself (and I was a mad dog hawk on the issue).
Since I've had a computer crash, I can't retrieve my saved articles on this matter, but simple chemicals like bleach easily erase evidence of anthrax, for example.
The UN inspectors knew in the 90's he was one step ahead of him, moving things all the time, and that was sometimes with just HOURS of notice. Saddam had over six months this time.
I can turn this around and ask you where the proof is we gave Iraq WMD? Show me proof.
So we agree on this statement?
Then I suppose you accept responsibility for the 5000 to 7000 Iraqi civilian deaths as well.
Just because our government has refused to count bodies does not mean there are no bodies. Check out www.iraqbodycount.net.
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