It's official: We have a scandal -- Final End

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Date Posted: 00:18:12 06/09/03 Mon
Author: Drummond
Subject: It's official: We have a scandal

http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2003/0306iraqgate_body.html

Credibility Gap over Iraq WMD Looms Larger

By Jim Lobe | June 3, 2003

Editor: John Gershman, Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC)
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

When all three major U.S. newsweeklies--Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News &
World Report--run major features on the same day on possible government
lying, you can bet you have the makings of a major scandal. And when the
two most important outlets of neoconservative opinion--The Weekly Standard
and The Wall Street Journal--come out on the same day with lead editorials
spluttering outrage about suggestions of government lying, you can bet that
things are going to get very hot as summer approaches in Washington.

The controversy over whether the administration of President George W. Bush
either exaggerated or lied about evidence that it said it had about the
existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by Iraq before the U.S.-led
invasion has mushroomed over the past week. "This is potentially very
serious," said one congressional aide. "If it's shown we went to war
because of intelligence that was 'cooked' by the administration, heads will
have to roll, and not just little heads, big ones."

The administration was already on the defensive last week as the
controversy took off in Europe, particularly in Britain where Prime
Minister Tony Blair found himself assailed from all directions for either
willfully exaggerating the intelligence himself or being "suckered," as his
former foreign minister Robin Cook called it this weekend, by Washington's
neoconservative hawks, who started agitating for war even before the dust
settled in lower Manhattan after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Matters took a turn for the worse when the London Guardian reported
Saturday about the existence of a transcript, obviously leaked from a
senior British official, of an exchange at the Waldorf Hotel in New York
between U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and British Foreign Minister
Jack Straw just before Powell's presentation of the evidence against Iraq
before the United Nations Security Council on February 5.

It quotes Powell, whose forceful case to the Council was decisive in
persuading U.S. public opinion that Baghdad represented a serious threat,
as being "apprehensive" about the evidence presented to him by the
intelligence agencies. He reportedly expressed the hope that the actual
facts, when they came out, would not "explode in their faces." (At a Rome
press conference Monday, Powell insisted that he considered the evidence
"overwhelming" when he spoke before the Council.) But it appears that
Powell's musing was accurate, as, after almost two months in uncontested
control of Iraq, U.S. troops and investigators have failed to come up with
concrete evidence of an Iraqi WMD program, let alone an actual weapon.

The scenario of an uneasy Powell received a major boost in the accounts of
the three newsweeklies. U.S. News reported, for example, that, during a
rehearsal of Powell's presentation at CIA headquarters on February 1st ,
the normally mild-mannered retired general at one point "tossed several
pages in the air. 'I'm not reading this', he declared. 'This is bull----'."

No Reliable Information

The same magazine also reported that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)
formally concluded that, "There is no reliable information on whether Iraq
is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons" in September 2002, just as
Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld was telling Congress that the Baghdad
"regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons,
including VX, sarin, cyclosarin, and mustard gas."

The Newsweek and Time accounts were similarly damning. One "informed
military source," told Newsweek that when the U.S. Central Command
(CENTCOM) asked the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for specific WMD
targets that should be destroyed in the first stages of the invasion, the
agency complied only reluctantly. But what it provided "was crap," a
CENTCOM planner told the magazine, consisting mainly of buildings that were
bombed in the first Gulf War in 1991. And agency experts reportedly could
not tell the war-planners what agents were located where.

If true, that contradicts a series of bald assertions by administration
officials and their supporters over the past nine months. "Simply stated,"
Vice President Dick Cheney declared in the first call to arms last August,
"there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass
destruction." Rumsfeld declared that, "We know where (the WMD) are," in a
television interview March 30, well into the first week of the war.
"They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and
north somewhat." He has since retreated from that certainty, suggesting
last week that the Iraqis "may have had time to destroy them, and I don't
know the answer."

There is also growing doubt about the evidence that Bush himself touted
this weekend as proof--two truck trailers described by officials as mobile
weapons-productions labs. According to a CIA report noted in the online
magazine Slate, key equipment for growing, sterilizing, and drying bacteria
was not present in either trailer. Iraqi officials have said the trailers
were used to produce hydrogen for artillery weather balloons.

Matthew Meselson, a Harvard University expert on biological weapons, who 20
years ago single-handedly debunked reports by senior Reagan administration
officials--several of whom hold relevant positions in the Bush government--
about the use by Soviet allies of mycotoxins against rebels in Laos and
Afghanistan, has also expressed doubts about the trailers' purpose, and has
called for the CIA to hand over the evidence to independent scientists to
make an assessment.

Retired intelligence officials from both the CIA and the DIA are also
coming out with ever-stronger statements accusing the intelligence
community of twisting and exaggerating the evidence to justify war. They
say both agencies were intimidated by the political pressure exerted in
particular by neoconservative hawks under Cheney and Rumsfeld, who even
established a special unit in the defense secretary's office to determine
what intelligence was "missing."

Much of the evidence on which the WMD case was based came from defectors
supplied by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an exile group headed by
Ahmed Chalabi that has been championed by the neoconservatives--including
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Cheney chief of staff I. Lewis
Libby, and Defense Policy Board members Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, and
James Woolsey--for more than a decade.

Retired senior CIA, DIA, and State Department intelligence officers,
including the CIA's former counter-terrorism chief Vince Cannistraro and
the DIA's former chief of Middle East intelligence W. Patrick Lang, have
also spoken bluntly to reporters about what they call the administration's
corruption of the intelligence process to justify war. Both the CIA and
State have long distrusted the INC and Chalabi, in particular, although he
remains the Pentagon's favorite for leading an interim government in
Baghdad.

All of this has outraged the administration, which insists the intelligence
community was united in its assessment about the existence of WMD, and its
neoconservative defenders. The Wall Street Journal on Monday accused the
"French and the European left" of trying to tarnish the U.S. victory and
charged that discontent among CIA analysts was spurred by resentment of
Rumsfeld. But even the Journal appeared to be moving away from its previous
position that Iraq's alleged WMD constituted a threat to the United States
and its allies. "Whether or not WMD is found takes nothing away from the
Iraq war victory," it said, citing the gains made in human rights by Saddam
Hussein's demise.

Arguments over what the administration knew about weapons of mass
destruction and when it knew it--to paraphrase the famous Watergate
questions--are now claiming the limelight, to the administration's clear
discomfort.

On June 1, the powerful chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
said he hoped to begin hearings--with the Select Committee on Intelligence--
before the July 4th recess, while the ranking member of the House of
Representatives Intelligence Committee has asked the CIA to produce a
report by July 1st reconciling its pre-war assessments with actual findings
on the ground.

(Jim Lobe is a political analyst with Foreign Policy
in Focus (online at www.fpif.org). He also writes regularly for Inter Press
Service.)

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