IRAQ: Weapons of Mass Disappearance - (Where are the WMD? Manipulation to go to War? )

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?
By MICHAEL DUFFY

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:

You have to give Defense Secretary Rumsfeld this credit: he's a risk taker, and he's damned brassy about it.

Both were in evidence last week when he testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Under criticism for his prior characterizations of France and Germany as "old Europe," Rumsfeld fumed: "We would not be facing the problems in Iraq today if the technologically advanced countries of the world had seen the danger and strictly enforced the economic sanctions against Iraq."

The Defense Secretary knew well, naturally, his audience in the Senate Armed Services Committee. As Senator Robert Byrd recently said from the Senate floor, ...."this Chamber is, for the most part, silent--ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing."

Still, Rumsfeld's statement was some chutspa! He was well aware that it was the U.S. Senate itself (Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs) which had conducted extensive hearings in 1992 and 1994 on "United States Dual-Use Exports to Iraq and Their Impact on the Health of Persian Gulf War Veterans." And he'd probably read the front page Washington Post story ("U.S. Had Key Role in Iraq Buildup", 12/30/02) based upon recently declassified documents, which revealed that it was Rumsfeld himself who, as President Reagan's Middle East Envoy, had traveled to the Region to meet with Saddam Hussein in December 1983 to normalize, particularly, security relations.

At the time of the visit , Iraq had already been removed from the State Department's list of terrorist countries in 1982; and in the previous month, November, President Reagan had approved National Security Decision Directive 114, on expansion of U.S.-Iraq relations generally. But it was Donald Rumsfeld's trip to Baghdad which opened of the floodgates during 1985-90 for lucrative U.S. weapons exports--some $1.5 billion worth-- including chemical/biological and nuclear weapons equipment and technology, along with critical components for missile delivery systems for all of the above. According to a 1994 GAO Letter Report (GAO/NSIAD-94-98) some 771 weapons export licenses for Iraq were approved during this six year period....not by our European allies, but by the U.S. Department of Commerce.

To be sure, many of these weapons were expended in the latter phases of the Iran-Iraq war. Others were destroyed by Coalition forces in the Persian Gulf War, or by UN weapons inspectors in the control regime established by the UN Security Council following that conflict. But a great many undoubtedly remain, and pose grave risks to the 150,000 U.S. troops deployed in Kuwait, and 100,000 on the way. Imagine the embarrassment to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld before the Armed Services Committee last week if one or more Senators had had the awareness AND the courage to raise the matter of Iraq's secret supplier.

And in this case, the devil is quite literally in the details.

There were few if any reservations evident in the range of weapons which President Ronald Reagan, and his successor George W. H. Bush were willing to sell Saddam Hussein. Under the Arms Export Control Act of 1976, the foreign sale of munitions and other defense equipment and technology are controlled by the Department of State. During the 1980s, such items could not be sold or diverted to Communist states, nor to those on the U.S. list of terrorist-supporting countries. When Iraq came off that list in 1982, however, some $48 million of items such as data privacy devices, voice scramblers, communication and navigation equipment, electronic components, image intensifiers and pistols (to protect Saddam) were approved for sale during 1985-90.

But it was through the purchase of $1.5 billion of American "dual-use items," having, sometimes arguably, both military and civilian functions, that Iraq obtained the bulk of it weapons of mass destruction in the late 80s. "Duel-use items" are controlled and licensed by the Department of Commerce under the Export Administration Act of 1979. This is where the real damage was done.

In 1992 and again in1994, hearings were conducted by the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, which has Senate oversight responsibility for the Export Administration Act. The purpose of the hearings was the Committee's concern that "tens of thousands" of Gulf War veterans were suffering from symptoms associated with the "Gulf War Syndrome", possibly due to their exposure to chemical and biological agents that had been exported from the U.S. during that brief period of "normalisation" of relations with Iraq in 1985-90.

At the opening of the second round of hearings on May 25,1994, Chairman Donald Riegle and Ranking Member Alphonse D'Amato released a detailed staff report which constituted a searing indictment of U.S. arms export policies during the Reagan/Bush Administrations, linking those exports to the health problems of Gulf War veterans, and excoriating the then current (Clinton) Administration for denying that such a link existed.

According to the hearing reports (which are available on a current website: www.chronicillnet.org/PGWS/tuite/default.htm) among the chemical weapons which had been sold to Iraq were some of the very most lethal available: Sarin, Soman, Tabun, VX, Lewisite, Cyanogen Chloride, Hydrogen Cyanide, blister agents and Mustard Gas. Some of the powerful biological agents sold included anthrax, Clostridium Botulinum, Histoplasma Capsulatum (causes a tuberculosis-like disease) , Brucella Melitensis, Clostridium Perfringens and Escherichia Coli.

Witnesses on the first day of the hearings included Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, Edwin Dorn, and the officials in both the Defense Department and the CIA responsible for non-proliferation policy. Interestingly, in what was often an adversarial exchange between the Committee and these officials, the latter admitted in sworn testimony that while no chemical/biological weapons had been found to have been "stored or used" by the Iraqi Army during the conflict, American troops had nevertheless been exposed to airborne traces of C/B agents from having been downwind of storage facilities that were bombed by U.S. planes.

Simply put, while Saddam Hussein had shown restraint in the Gulf War by not deploying his most lethal weapons, the U.S. Government had, a) sold chemical/biological agents and shipped them directly to Iraqi military installations, including some just months before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, b) distributed faulty chemical/biological agent detection sensors and protrction gear such as gasmasks to U.S. troops and, c) caused the exposure of these troops by the bombing of military storage areas upwind of them.

It got worse. Dr. Gordon Oehler, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency's Non-Proliferation Center testified that, between 1984 and 1990, the CIA's Office of Scientific and Weapons Research had issued five alert memos...." covering Iraqi's dealings with United States firms on purchases, discussions, or visits that appeared to be related to weapons of mass destruction programs." Such memos, Oehler explained, were sent to Commerce, Justice, Treasury and the FBI when collected intelligence indicated that U.S. firms had been targeted by foreign governments of concern, or were involved in possible violations of U.S. law.

At another point in the hearings, Dr. Oehler indicated that CIA's concerns about Iraqi weapons programs, in particular...."a Samarra chemical plant, including six separate chemical weapons lines between 1983 and 1986," had been reported...."directly to our customers." Under questioning from Chairman Riegle, he identified these as the President and the Secretaries of Defense and State.

Perhaps the most surprising testimony taken by the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs was that given in the earlier 1992 hearings on the matter of U.S. assistance to the Iraqi ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs. Gary Milhollin, Director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, testified that U.S. companies were being licensed by the Commerce Department to ship such items directly to the Al-Qaqaa and Badr facilities, which the Pentagon had formally identified as part of the Iraqi nuclear weapons production program, and to Salah al Din, known to be the center of its ballistic missile development efforts.

In all, Milhollin identified 40 U.S. companies involved in such sales. And it was critical equipment--vacuum pumps, electron beam welders, mass spectrometers, accelerometers, missile guidance systems, navigational radar, high speed computers and filling systems to load CB agents in missiles, among many other items. Such "stuff" was being sent to Iraq until late 1989 less than a year before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait!

Through the mid and late 1980s, said Milhollin, the Pentagon, the CIA and the Office Naval Intelligence, among others, continued to warn the White House that Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons were maturing at a rapid pace, as was work on the ballistic missiles to deliver them. The warnings were falling on deaf ears: in October, 1989, 10 months before the Kuwait invasion, President George Bush signed NSD 26, updating NSDD 114, and again committing the U.S. to normal relations with Saddam Hussein's government.

As had been the case with chemical and biological weapons, the list of American and European companies which sold the nuclear equipment and technology to Iraq were a virtual pantheon of industry names: Hewlett Packard, International Computer Systems, Siemens, TI Coating, Carl Zeiss, Rockwell Collins International, Spectra Physics, Unisys, Tektronix, Scientific Atlanta and Semetex, among many, many others. With such assistance, Iraq became a regional power during 1984-90, and developed regional ambitions.

But these companies were not, per se, Saddam Hussein's main weapons suppliers: that designation should properly go to Ronald Reagan and George W.H. Bush, the signers, respectively, of NSDD 114 and NSD 26, both of which remain classified. As the primary recipients and ultimate "customers" of the alert memos from the CIA and the U.S. intelligence community, they were currently and fully aware of the use to which the equipment and technology were being put, and of the security policy implications of the process.

And the instrument, the person, the envoy, who negotiated the process in the first instance, is the current U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld.

Steven Green lives in Berlin, Vermont. He can be reached at: sjgreen@sover.net

http://www.counterpunch.org/green02242003.html

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