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
Re the 100's of books - go to a good library. Google search a little. Many have been witten in the 90's alone.
I've not mentioned Powell's name on any thread here so don't know what/whose thread you're referring to.
Yes, the UN Security Council said Saddam was known to have a WMD program and it was up to him to provide proof with what he did with it. He didn't provide such proof.
And, a little newsflash yourself - it wasn't only two decades ago Saddam used WMD - he used them on over 40 villages in the 90's.
The Czech government never backed away from reports about meetings between AQ and Iraq. Saddam patterned himself after Stalin and thought the way to control his corner of the world was with WMD and he became increasing irrational and dangerous after the Gulf War.
To consider him contained as a world threat after the Gulf War is naive at best.
Does that make it reasonable to go kill my neighbor because I am told he has a gun and might use it on me to do harm, even though he denies having a gun and I haven't seen one? Could you prove that you have no gun to point at me, and would you be willing to let me relentlessly and continuously search the most private parts of your home to satisfy my fear that you do? Think about it from outside the box of what we've been told for a while. The inability to produce these weapons, the ones that are supposedly present in such HUGE quantities, makes me re-examine everything I've been told all along with a very cynical eye and ear.
If the administration wants me to believe they have told me the truth, they can present the evidence I was told would be there as proof. That's all I'm asking. I think it is a reasonable request. If they were wrong, if they acted on intelligence lies, they need to admit that, and then go after those who misled us into a war with Iraq with the same vigor with which we went after Saddam.
And you have yet to respond to my post that the Washington Post, Red Cross and human rights organizations have reported for years that Saddam regularly killed as many as 5,000 innocent Iraqi civilians EACH MONTH. But don't let the facts get in the way of your judgment.
That was his business just like the good ol' USA torching about 80 folks in a church in Waco TX back in 1993.
"He gassed over 40 villages after the Gulf War. He used the oil for food program to grow his WMD program from a multi-million dollar program to a billion dollar program." -- Peach
But in an interview with Polish T-V, President Bush said banned armaments have been found in Iraq. Bush said searchers had found weapons of mass destruction and biological labs. He provided no details.
He’s still running around telling these lies. Here’s the link:
http://www.wokr13.tv/news/national/story.aspx?content_id=4DFAA08B-E986-43E5-9106-1A035A55185B
Then we would have all been consistantly conned since 1998. That's when the UN released their report that the weapons of mass destruction existed in the quantities referenced by Bush. It was also the basis on which Clinton, and the democrat congress, decided to bomb Iraq. Where do you suppose those known stockpiles went? Do you really think Saddam disposed of them AFTER the weapons inspectors left? Do you really think Saddam bribed the weapons inspectors because they knew he disposed of them? Do you think Saddam refused to reveal he disposed of the WMD's because he really wanted us to come in and depose him?
You'd really have to have some kind of convoluted thinking to believe you were lied to.
The people in power at that time have not paid the price for what they did and probably never will. Janet Reno and Bill Clinton decided going after a group of people who didn't fit with the norm and going after Microsoft was more important than handling Iraq and AQ - even after AQ attacked our country repeatedly on their watch.
He was also a liar. He claimed that there was genocide in Kosovo (there wasn't). There may be WMDs in Iraq but Clinton the liar is hardly a credible source, no matter how matter anyone spins it.
So we agree on this statement?
Bush, Blair Face Heat on Iraq Weapons
President Bush said this weekend that weapons had already been found. As evidence, though, he pointed to two suspected biological laboratories which both the Pentagon and U.S. weapons hunters have said do not constitute arms.
ROFL.
Give the exact listing of all the WMD (heck, just weapons of ANY kind) that the United States gave to or sold to Iraq.
It's not a question of talent, it's a question of facts. It's been a long-term hand-waving lie that the United States "armed" Iraq, which you unfortunately seem to have bought into.
Which is what happened on 9/11!
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