Iraq WMD news

[RonnieDobbs]

Because I know some may not sign up just to read one article:

Missing in Action: Truth
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF


When I raised the Mystery of the Missing W.M.D. recently, hawks fired barrages of reproachful e-mail at me. The gist was: "You *&#*! Who cares if we never find weapons of mass destruction, because we've liberated the Iraqi people from a murderous tyrant."

But it does matter, enormously, for American credibility. After all, as Ari Fleischer said on April 10 about W.M.D.: "That is what this war was about."

I rejoice in the newfound freedoms in Iraq. But there are indications that the U.S. government souped up intelligence, leaned on spooks to change their conclusions and concealed contrary information to deceive people at home and around the world.

Let's fervently hope that tomorrow we find an Iraqi superdome filled with 500 tons of mustard gas and nerve gas, 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 29,984 prohibited munitions capable of delivering chemical agents, several dozen Scud missiles, gas centrifuges to enrich uranium, 18 mobile biological warfare factories, long-range unmanned aerial vehicles to dispense anthrax, and proof of close ties with Al Qaeda. Those are the things that President Bush or his aides suggested Iraq might have, and I don't want to believe that top administration officials tried to win support for the war with a campaign of wholesale deceit.

Consider the now-disproved claims by President Bush and Colin Powell that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger so it could build nuclear weapons. As Seymour Hersh noted in The New Yorker, the claims were based on documents that had been forged so amateurishly that they should never have been taken seriously.

I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.

The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade. In addition, the Niger mining program was structured so that the uranium diversion had been impossible. The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted — except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway.

"It's disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were bamboozled because they knew about this for a year," one insider said.

Another example is the abuse of intelligence from Hussein Kamel, a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein and head of Iraq's biological weapons program until his defection in 1995. Top British and American officials kept citing information from Mr. Kamel as evidence of a huge secret Iraqi program, even though Mr. Kamel had actually emphasized that Iraq had mostly given up its W.M.D. program in the early 1990's. Glen Rangwala, a British Iraq expert, says the transcript of Mr. Kamel's debriefing was leaked because insiders resented the way politicians were misleading the public.

Patrick Lang, a former head of Middle Eastern affairs in the Defense Intelligence Agency, says that he hears from those still in the intelligence world that when experts wrote reports that were skeptical about Iraq's W.M.D., "they were encouraged to think it over again."

"In this administration, the pressure to get product `right' is coming out of O.S.D. [the Office of the Secretary of Defense]," Mr. Lang said. He added that intelligence experts had cautioned that Iraqis would not necessarily line up to cheer U.S. troops and that the Shiite clergy could be a problem. "The guys who tried to tell them that came to understand that this advice was not welcome," he said.

"The intelligence that our officials was given regarding W.M.D. was either defective or manipulated," Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico noted. Another senator is even more blunt and, sadly, exactly right: "Intelligence was manipulated."

The C.I.A. was terribly damaged when William Casey, its director in the Reagan era, manipulated intelligence to exaggerate the Soviet threat in Central America to whip up support for Ronald Reagan's policies. Now something is again rotten in the state of Spookdom.

[tucker342]

Sad...

Not really surprising, but still very sad.

(If it's true...)

[AgPete]

What a useless war. I was on the edge about this war but overall, I'd have to say I supported it because I thought Iraq was maintaining a secret WMD operation that would eventually fall into the hands of the terrorists it supported. Not only are we not finding any evidence of WMD, we're having a difficult time linking Iraq to terrorism. And now the religious extremist elements in Iraq are trying to quickly take control of the government and we risk having another Iran on our hands. This could end up being a huge disaster, but isn't it always a disaster when we decide to be the world's policeman. Afghanistan and the Soviet Union becoming the Taliban, Panama and Manuel Noriega, Iran and the Shah, and now Iraq. Two times I might add, once with Hussein and now another potential threat if it becomes a theocracy. Is there a country that hasn't backfired on us yet?

[Brillig]

Japan.

Next!

[mrskippy]

John Galt ... your tag says you live in Manhatten ... I dread the day a dirty bomb is blasted near your office building and you end up with cancer.

[tucker342]

Originally posted by John Galt
Leader lies to people and may have sacrified a lot of lives for a cause he didn't believe in and your only response is don't vote for him?

BTW, I didn't vote for Bush or Gore (though I probably would've voted for Bush if I had to choose). Bush, like Clinton, like Bush Sr., like Reagen, like Nixon, etc. seem to lie to justify misguided policies. The logic of your reply (not attacking the president, just deciding not to vote for him) ensures there will never be choices other than Kodos and Kang.

I'm just wondering, who did u vote for in the election, did you vote Green?

If I could vote(not 18) that's probably how I would vote

I was just wondering.

[Taur]

I can't believe people are shocked by this. Doesn't anyone remember the Iraqi Nuclear program? Or, the so call Iraqi program the Powell and the White House sited in his speach.

After finishing his speach before the UN Powell turned over his Proof about Iraq's Nuclear program. Most Documents were 1 to 2 years old.
PROBLEMS WITH NUCLEAR PROGRAM
1. Some of the Parties involved had been dead for over 10 years.
2. One party had not been in office since th 60s
3. Many of the signitures were "Backwards". One was signed upside down and backwards.

The Director if the CIA immediately came forward to deny that his office had absolutely nothing to do with this. He said that it was a very Amateurish and even called some of the signateurs child-like. He also mentioned that if an Intelligence agency had done this they would of at least been able to get all the names right. But, all the forms were right and in the right order so it was probably someone that had a working knowledge of a nuclear program and access to nuclear forms.(1600 Pensylvania Ave)

So this little snip about no WMDs does not surprise me at all.