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
CounterPunch is the bi-weekly muckraking newsletter edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. Twice a month we bring our readers the stories that the corporate press never prints. We aren't side-line journalists here at CounterPunch. Ours is muckraking with a radical attitude and nothing makes us happier than when CounterPunch readers write in to say how useful they've found our newsletter in their battles against the war machine, big business and the rapers of nature.
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I'd source this, but y'all can get to it by clicking on the link that Buckeroo provided. [derisive laughter]
Doesn't matter!
The Media is trying to frame this debate to be about massive quantities of WMD!
Saddam and his ilk are a Clear and Present Danger!
What's the problem with that? The media simply took the cue from the commander-in-chief and his zombie squad.
"The Media is trying to frame this debate to be about massive quantities of WMD!" -- Ernest_at_the_Beach
Great Expectations | Iraqis embrace freedom--even though it starts off messy.
We have :
BAGHDAD--"This is my brother," cries a man. "This is not my husband," wails his sister-in-law. They are arguing over a bag of bones, and it is hard to tell whether he is over-eager for closure or she in denial. The man says he recognizes his brother's dishdasha, or robe, but admits that he could be more certain if there were a skull and dental work to look at. Hundreds of identical plastic bags, likewise filled with the remains of Shiites who rose up against Saddam in 1991, litter the ground nearby.
Among the thousands of friends and relatives who have come to this mass grave near Hilla to find their loved ones, there is surprisingly little bitterness against the U.S. for encouraging and then abandoning that rebellion. Some even express hope that Iraq could become an American state. "Saddam, Saddam," one man mutters in disbelief, staring at the bodies. "Television only show Iraq Ali Baba [Iraqis as thieves]," complains another of the foreign media's fixation with looting, "not show this."
Not surprisingly, none of these people thinks that finding weapons of mass destruction is critical to the case for war. The old regime did most of its dirty work the old-fashioned way, with a pistol to the head. Nor are they alarmed, like so many distant pundits, that Iraq has traded tyranny for anarchy. Even a messy freedom is something to savor.
Before: ". . . the good ol' USA gave Saddam WMD back in the 1980's . . . ," and
After: ". . . America provided the means for WMD proliferation not just in Iraq . . . ."
Thus, the term "evolve." You are parsing words with the wrong guy. And you want "debate" concerning everything you cut & paste from a wack-job Lefty website? Try formulating your argument first, or have your cabana-boy Cockburn come on-line and defend you.
and you know this how? Facts please. Probvable facts. Not idle speculation and innuendo, or repeating statements of someone you heard somewhere on teh media as though it were a fact. I would point out that we seem to be kissing palestinian and Saudi A** lately, not bombing them. Saudi's attacked us at the WTC, tehy financed it, they used their own banks to transfer the funds. Palistinians have killed us in suicide attacks in Israel. I can see them as being a clear and present danger, but what, exactly, made Iraq such? The WMD's they had in HUGE QUANTITIES and were willing, even planning, to use against us? Well, where the H*ll are they?
I'm getting tired of being fed a bunch of BS, which is what the WMD claims are beginning to look like. You can eat all the stuff you want if you like it that much, but I don't like the taste of it and aint willingly gonna eat anymore of it.
Just show me the WMD's. That's all I ask. I think that's a reasonable request.
Well, I agree here. I'm still waiting.
But I'm going to have to form some conclusions in the somewhat near future and I'll form them on the evidence presented to me. So far, no evidence has been presented. And I don't see how a dead or missing and deposed dictator could still keep an iron fist on all the people ,Scientific, manufacturing, military, and general civilian population, that would have to have information on them. It just isn't making sense. Someone would have come forward with information about where this HUGE QUANTITY of WMD's are (just to get in our good graces in nothing else). I'm beginning to think I've been lied to, and I absolutely hate being lied to. More than anything else on the earth, I hate being lied to.
In God I trust, from all others I want to see some proof.
Me too. What an interesting thread. I posted acouple comments this AM, go to church and get involved in my son's graduation activities and lo and behold we have 200 plus posts with Freepers taking the RAT position over and over. Some even quoting that old friend of the USSR, Alexander Cockburn. Unbelievable. Bookmarking for future comments to the naysayers
Very nice word smithing but irrelevant. The facts are that this war appears to have been without justification. Each day that goes by without finding any substantiation of the WMDs just makes it more likely that there never were any. It is soon time for Congress to launch an investigation to determine who screwed up or who lied. The people need to know and they need to know well before the next election. And everyone please remember that 9/11 is not a justification for this war since the perpetrators are not the people we attacked, despite all the confounding propaganda that has been strewn about.
No one screwed up; this war and all that lead up to it is more complex, a labyrinthine of enormous proportions that travel back to years of ebbing and flowing politics where not all solutions are useful – this one was.
So they can elect who....a libertarian? Fat Freakin' Chance.
Many Freepers have seen the evidence that convinces them Wolfowitz is correct and we're glad someone from the administration is finally saying it publicly. Members of Congress have also stated in years past they believe Saddam was behind OKC and the first WTC attack.
Well now that you mention it, if it appears that the Republicans are liars who committed mass murder for financial advantage then they should be out of the running. At least if they nominate Bush again.
Then all you conservatives will have a choice between a leftist Democrat who you wouldn't trust to bathe your dog and a Libertarian who will really defend the constitution. Who will you be voting for? Seems like a no-brainer to me.
That is why we have so many people starting to campaign for the Libertarian nomination-more than ever before and more than a year ahead of the convention.
BTW the convention will be in Atlanta during the July 4th weekend of 2004. You have plenty of time to get involved with your local or state party and work toward being a delegate to that convention. Just remember that we get no money from the government for the convention or the election. Each delegate pays his own way all the way.
Is that strong or weak? The question is meaningless. The more important question is strong or weak for what purpose?
Clinton gave North Korea nuclear technology with no oversight. Given that technology by Clinton, they now have the ability to take out a few west coast cities.
Al Quada attacked us how many times during Clinton's tenure? Clinton did nothing.
The Black Hawk down incident, where Clinton refused the give our troops the tanks they requested as back-up, has been mentioned by OBL and Saddam Hussein. Both thought it showed how weak America's military was.
I've read a few dozen articles that tell the story of how Clinton was offered OBL's head on a platter, but he refused saying he didn't think he could indict him on any charges!
Then of course we have the Cox Report and Bill Gertz's excellent book about China and how CLinton sold China nuclear technology in exchange for $$.
I thought these things were so well known to Freepers that I wouldn't need to elaborate when I mentioned I thought Clinton was weak on foreign policy. I wasn't trying to parse words like "weak" and you may call it anything you want, but I call it being a lousy president and derelict in his duty to protect the nation.
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