US 'doubted Iraq's arsenal'

[iggy1I]

Hmmmm...this is kind of interesting....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2970064.stm

A leaked US intelligence report has cast fresh doubt on the coalition claims that Iraq had banned weapons which served as justification for going to war.
The secret September 2002 Pentagon intelligence report concluded that there was "no reliable information" that Iraq had biological or chemical weapons.

It is believed the report was widely circulated among the Bush administration at a time when senior officials were putting the case for military action.

The latest twist in the weapons row came as United Nations nuclear experts arrived in Iraq to investigate post-war looting of material from the country's main nuclear facility.

The BBC's Pentagon correspondent Nick Childs says the 80-page report from the Defence Intelligence Agency will only fuel the controversy over alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

It contradicted Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's claim at the time that Iraq had amassed large stockpiles of nerve agent and mustard gas.
US forces have not yet found any WMD in Iraq. Two suspect mobile laboratories have been located but have not provided any proof of banned weapons programmes.

Senior Pentagon officials confirmed that the report said there was no reliable information on whether Iraq was stockpiling and producing chemical weapons.

But the officials stress that there was no US or international presence on the ground in Iraq at the time and that therefore there could be no definitive evidence.

They also say the report suggests that there was no doubt Iraq had the capability and expertise to produce such weapons and was probably doing so.

Intelligence criticised

US administration officials still insist that their claims about Iraqi WMD will be proved to be accurate.

The CIA has launched an investigation to see if intelligence reports were distorted to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

The UN chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, has criticised the quality of intelligence given to him by the US and Britain about Iraq's alleged WMD.

Mr Blix told the BBC that his teams followed up US and British leads at suspected sites across Iraq, but found nothing when they got there.

Contamination

The team of seven experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will spend two weeks at the Tuwaitha complex, 50 kilometres (30 miles) south of Baghdad.


They will try to determine what is missing, deal with what is left and make it safe.

The UN experts at Tuwaitha are being blocked from investigating the reports of contamination and sickness. The US argues that as the occupying power it is responsible for the health of the Iraqi people.

The number of inspectors has been limited by the Pentagon to seven, and their assessment has to be completed in two weeks.

Local people have been using barrels that held highly radioactive material to store food or wash clothes and some have complained of subsequent health problems, such as nose bleeds and vomiting.

The inspectors were allowed in after the IAEA director, Mohamed ElBaradei, said a radiological emergency could be brewing at the plant after looters left behind piles of uranium and spilled radioactive materials.

Local people say looters were not after the uranium itself. They tipped it onto the ground so they could take away the containers to store food and water, the BBC's Caroline Hawley reports from Baghdad.

Workers living on the site, worried about being contaminated themselves, buried the spilled uranium in cement and appealed for international help.

Limited access

Before the war, the site held two tons of low-grade enriched uranium and several tons of natural uranium. A storage facility near the site held several hundred other radiological sources.

The IAEA will check stocks of enriched uranium and "yellow cake", or processed mined uranium, against its detailed inventory lists.

US defence officials quoted by the Reuters news agency insist that US troops accompany the UN inspectors at the site, and that the visit sets no precedent for a future IAEA role in Iraq.

The Americans will deal with the search for WMD themselves - a US-backed team of 1,400 inspectors is due in Iraq in the coming days.

[carogonza]

this comes as no shock. tsk tsk tsk shame on them

[tncorgi]

TODAY'S EDITORIALS
Was the Intelligence Cooked?
he latest vogue in Washington is the proposition that it really doesn't matter whether Saddam Hussein maintained an arsenal of unconventional weapons in recent years. American troops may not have uncovered any evidence of the weapons of mass destruction the Bush administration was warning about, the argument goes. But they have found plenty of proof that Iraq suffered under a brutal dictator who slaughtered thousands, perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands of his own people, and that is reason enough to justify the invasion. We disagree. We are as pleased as anyone to see Saddam Hussein removed from power, but the United States cannot now simply erase from the record the Bush administration's dire warnings about the Iraqi weapons threat. The good word of the United States is too central to America's leadership abroad — and to President Bush's dubious doctrine of pre-emptive warfare — to be treated so cavalierly.

Like most Americans, we believed the government's repeated warnings that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction threatened the security of the world. The urgent need to disarm Saddam Hussein was the primary reason invoked for going to war in March rather than waiting to see if weapons inspectors could bring Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs under control.

It would still be premature to conclude that Iraq abandoned its efforts to manufacture and stockpile unconventional arms after the first Persian Gulf war in 1991. But after weeks of futile searching by American teams, it seems clear that Iraq was not bristling with horrific arms and that chemical and biological weapons were not readily available to frontline Iraqi forces.

America's intelligence agencies betrayed little doubt about the Iraqi threat last October when they produced a comprehensive assessment of Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction. A declassified version, while noting that Iraq was hiding large portions of its weapons programs, flatly stated: "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of U.N. restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade." The question today is whether that and other assessments were sound or were influenced by a desire to tailor intelligence findings to policy prescriptions.

By their nature, intelligence reports, in the absence of a smoking gun, are subjective exercises based on ambiguous information that is open to differing interpretations. In the case of Iraq, Washington relied largely on circumstantial data rather than spy satellite photographs or intercepted phone calls that would have proved and pinpointed the existence of unconventional weapons. But given the failure so far to find a single weapon of mass destruction, it is fair to wonder if intelligence analysts might have misread the available data, played down ambiguities or even pushed their findings too far to stay square with Bush policy on Iraq. George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, has said that the C.I.A.'s work was not compromised by politics.

These matters are properly being examined by Congressional committees and a White House advisory board on intelligence practices, as well as by the Central Intelligence Agency itself. It is also reasonable to ask if the administration's fixation on Iraq influenced the way intelligence reports were used by top officials intent on making the case for war. Careful attention should be given to examining the work of a separate Pentagon unit that was created after Sept. 11 to search for terrorist links with Iraq.

The issue goes to the heart of American leadership. Mr. Bush's belief that the United States has the right to use force against nations that it believes may threaten American security is based on the assumption that Washington can make accurate judgments about how serious such a danger is. If the intelligence is wrong, or the government distorts it, the United States will squander its credibility. Even worse, it will lose the ability to rally the world, and the American people, to the defense of the country when real threats materialize.


http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/08/opinion/08SUN1.html

[tncorgi]

the drum beat grown louder....

Editors Note
The Guardian has removed this article from their website and has posted the following:
A report which was posted on our website on June 4 under the heading "Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil" misconstrued remarks made by the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, making it appear that he had said that oil was the main reason for going to war in Iraq. He did not say that. He said, according to the Department of Defence website, "The ... difference between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq."

The sense was clearly that the US had no economic options by means of which to achieve its objectives, not that the economic value of the oil motivated the war. The report appeared only on the website and has now been removed.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0604-10.htm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Published on Wednesday, June 4, 2003 by the Guardian/UK
Wolfowitz: Iraq War Was About Oil
by George Wright

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0604-10.htm



Oil was the main reason for military action against Iraq, a leading White House hawk has claimed, confirming the worst fears of those opposed to the US-led war.

The US Deputy Defense Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz - who has already undermined Tony Blair's position over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by describing them as a "bureaucratic" excuse for war - has now gone further by claiming the real motive was that Iraq is "swimming" in oil.

The latest comments were made by Mr Wolfowitz in an address to delegates at an Asian security summit in Singapore at the weekend, and reported today by German newspapers Der Tagesspiegel and Die Welt.

Asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found, the deputy defense minister said: "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."

Mr Wolfowitz went on to tell journalists at the conference that the US was set on a path of negotiation to help defuse tensions between North Korea and its neighbors - in contrast to the more belligerent attitude the Bush administration displayed in its dealings with Iraq.

His latest comments follow his widely reported statement from an interview in Vanity Fair last month, in which he said that "for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on: weapons of mass destruction."

Prior to that, his boss, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, had already undermined the British government's position by saying Saddam Hussein may have destroyed his banned weapons before the war.

Mr Wolfowitz's frank assessment of the importance of oil could not come at a worse time for the US and UK governments, which are both facing fierce criticism at home and abroad over allegations that they exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein in order to justify the war.

Amid growing calls from all parties for a public inquiry, the foreign affairs select committee announced last night it would investigate claims that the UK government misled the country over its evidence of Iraq's WMD.

The move is a major setback for Tony Blair, who had hoped to contain any inquiry within the intelligence and security committee, which meets in secret and reports to the prime minister.

In the US, the failure to find solid proof of chemical, biological and nuclear arms in Iraq has raised similar concerns over Mr Bush's justification for the war and prompted calls for congressional investigations.

Mr Wolfowitz is viewed as one of the most hawkish members of the Bush administration. The 57-year old expert in international relations was a strong advocate of military action against Afghanistan and Iraq.

Following the September 11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Mr Wolfowitz pledged that the US would pursue terrorists and "end" states' harboring or sponsoring of militants.

Prior to his appointment to the Bush cabinet in February 2001, Mr Wolfowitz was dean and professor of international relations at the Paul H Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), of the Johns Hopkins University.