posted on May 29, 2003 05:14:25 AM new
US finds evidence of WMD at last - buried in a field near Maryland
Julian Borger in Washington
Wednesday May 28, 2003
The Guardian
The good news for the Pentagon yesterday was that its investigators had finally unearthed evidence of weapons of mass destruction, including 100 vials of anthrax and other dangerous bacteria.
The bad news was that the stash was found, not in Iraq, but fewer than 50 miles from Washington, near Fort Detrick in the Maryland countryside.
The anthrax was a non-virulent strain, and the discoveries are apparently remnants of an abandoned germ warfare programme.
They merited only a local news item in the Washington Post.
But suspicious finds in Iraq have made front-page news (before later being cleared), given the failure of US military inspection teams to find evidence of the weapons that were the justification for the March invasion.
[b]Even more embarrassing for the Pentagon, there was no documentation about the various biological agents disposed of at the US bio-defence centre at Fort Detrick. Iraq's failure to come up with paperwork proving the
destruction of its biological arsenal was portrayed by the US as evidence of deception in the run-up to the war.[/b]
In an effort to explain why no chemical or biological weapons had been found in Iraq, the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said yesterday the regime may have destroyed them before the war.
Speaking to the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations thinktank, he said the speed of U.S. advance may have caught Iraq by surprise, but added: "It is also possible that they decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict."
The US germ warfare programme at Fort Detrick was officially wound up in 1969, but the base has maintained a stock of nasty bugs to help maintain America's defences against biological attack.
The leading theory about the unsolved anthrax letter attacks in 2001 is that they were carried out by a disgruntled former Fort Detrick employee; equipment found dumped in a pond eight miles from the base has been linked to the crimes.
The Fort Detrick clean-up has unearthed over 2,000 tonnes of hazardous waste.
The sanitation crews were shocked to find vials containing live bacteria. As well as the vaccine form of anthrax, the discarded biological agents included Brucella melitensis, which causes the virulent flu-like disease brucellosis, and klebsiella, a cause of pneumonia.
posted on May 29, 2003 10:45:50 AM new
Right! Sen. John D. Rockefeller said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press, "they may have overestimated." In other words, they lied. We have spent millions of tax dollars on an illegal war and killed housands of innocent people along with American troops. I hope that the dummies who fell for this story will wake up and see what's happening.
posted on May 29, 2003 11:25:48 AM new
Like a way for Bush to bolster his popularity for the 2004 elections?
One of my favorite quotes:
". . when we live under a president who took power by election fraud, who controls the world's largest collection of weapons of mass destruction, who is supported by religious fanatics, and who represents an ideology of imperial world domination through military superiority and economic exploitation, it's scary."
Cheryl
My religion is simple, my religion is kindness.
--Dalai Llama
Tony Blair stood accused last night of misleading Parliament and the British people over Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, and his claims that the threat posed by Iraq justified war.
Mr Rumsfeld ignited the row in a speech in New York, declaring: "It is ... possible that they [Iraq] decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict and I don't know the answer."
Speaking in the Commons before the crucial vote on war, Mr Blair told MPs that it was "palpably absurd" to claim that Saddam had destroyed weapons including 10,000 litres of anthrax, up to 6,500 chemical munitions; at least 80 tons of mustard gas, sarin, botulinum toxin and "a host of other biological poisons".
But Mr Cook said yesterday: "We were told Saddam had weapons ready for use within 45 minutes. It's now 45 days since the war has finished and we have still not found anything.
"It is plain he did not have that capacity to threaten us, possibly did not have the capacity to threaten even his neighbours, and that is profoundly important. We were, after all, told that those who opposed the resolution that would provide the basis for military action were in the wrong.
"Perhaps we should now admit they were in the right."
posted on May 29, 2003 12:43:34 PM new
Well I for one could care less if we really do find weapons...
I got what I wanted from the war and that was Saddam out of power... some of us had been there before and knew it was the right thing to do, no matter what pretext was used.
Pretty easy to sit on your a$$es at home and arm chair the world...
posted on May 29, 2003 03:04:14 PM new
Getting rid of Saddam was a sure thing once the U.S. invaded. That's not the problem. It's how can you trust a government that goes to war to find WOMD but comes up empty handed, then says at least we got Saddam out? How silly is that?
posted on May 29, 2003 04:02:14 PM new
According to the lefties, the Bush administration was supposed to be planting WMD's in Iraq.
Maybe the lefties are right: Saddam Hussien obstructed and defied UN inspectors and endured years of sanctions (losing billions of dollars) just for the heck of it.
posted on May 29, 2003 04:12:05 PM new
Oh who cares about the weapons of mass destruction! Sadamm and his gang was a weapon of mass destruction. I just shocked the entire world didn't outst this evil freak sooner. Hes no loss to the world and now we have control of the oil reserve. At least the oil is now in the hands of trustworthy and intelligent people such as ourselves.
posted on May 29, 2003 05:10:10 PM new
Oh Brother is right.
The most heinous crime of the new millennium
By Lisa Walsh Thomas
Online Journal Contributing Writer
"We have satellite photos that indicate that banned materials have recently been moved from a number of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction facilities. There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more." —Colin Powell on February 6, speaking to the UN Security Council, demanding their support for the invasion of Iraq
May 23, 2003—The greatest crime? Tall order, even if the millennium isn't three years old yet, because the new leaders of this country have had a running start since before the new millenium bells started ringing.
The long line at the rear is ready to give the honor to George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and others on the payroll to paralyze American hearts with fear of being nuked by Iraq (or whomever) so that Johnny could go marching off to war and see that dollars instead of euros triumph when the US takes over the slushy oilfields. But if you think the administration's imperialism is the greatest crime, remember what Bob Dylan sang to us a generation ago, recalling the murder of Hattie Carroll: "Now ain't the time for your tears." Because it gets worse.
The prize for most heinous crime doesn't go to George or Colin or any of the oily-fingered bunch, not even those who now face charges of war crimes (if we don't knock off Belgium first). It goes to the people of this country, those who are checking the Dow today, those out laughing over dinner as if all's right with the world, those signing new contracts for "better" lives, those with 14 tattered flags bedecking their SUVs, those who sleep well, truly believing that God's on our side even when we fib a little, those who, in blunt terms, simply don't give a damn that thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of innocent Iraqis lie dead, that more than a thousand Iraqi kids will never see summer. Never. Our kids will go to summer camp; a thousand Iraqi kids will rot underground. Therein lies a difference to be noted.
Enough of us marched in the streets and wrote into the late hours, begging the world to make the inexperienced but oil-hungry, power-seeking cowboy who stole our White House stop and take note of what the weapons inspectors were saying: no evidence of weapons of mass destruction. We begged; the pope begged; the leaders of every major Christian church in America except for the Baptists begged; Nobel laureates begged; the Dalai Lama begged; millions of people who care gathered in the streets all over the world and begged: please don't blow off little Ahmed's legs or make him watch his mother die screaming, when you don't have one shred of evidence that his country is any kind of threat to anyone. Please don't blind his little sister just because her father's hut sits on oil. Please don't wipe out those 19-year old Iraqi boys who are going to fight to the death to defend their homeland against foreign invaders and their impressive "shock and awe." Please, for God's sake, let the inspectors find out if there is any danger in Iraq.
We begged until we were blue in the face. We were called commies, traitors, and ignorant fools, but worst of all, we were ignored. I personally received more hate mail than I can count asking me who I thought I was to question the wisdom of our president [sic]. Because I cried for the children whose days were numbered, I—and other writers and activists—were wished horrible deaths ourselves. One evil-wisher expressed the desire that I die in Saddam's arms.
Because somewhere, somehow, someone convinced the people of this country that George W. Bush is a man of God and has a hotline straight to Jesus. And the Jesus of these people was saying, "Kill, kill, kill."
In January George W. Bush put on his "sincere" look (the one reporters describe having seen him practice in the mirror) and faced 83 million people for the 2003 State of the Union, assuring them that Iraq had the materials "to produce over 25,000 liters of anthrax—enough doses to kill several million people . . . more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin—enough to subject millions of people to death by respiratory failure . . . as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent." That's surely enough to make a loyal patriot choke on his KFC chicken leg.
And they had the evidence. Both he and Colin Powell made that assurance at every opportunity. And the people (of this country) believed him. Terrified of being victims of Iraq, having their faces melted by Iraqi nukes, having their wives raped by the invading Iraqi army, they ran to Wal-Mart and bought flags by the dozens, frantically waved them, and demanded that the entire country "support our troops."
The quotes on the administration's certainty of Iraq's threat to the world could go on and on and on but do not deserve to be dignified by repetition. Worse, some of the things Bush told the 83 million people who watched that night were things that had already been unequivocably refuted by the International Atomic Energy Commission. He knew at the time he read them from his teleprompter that they were lies. The unelected leader of this country, whom we are told to respect come hell or high water, brazenly lied to 83 million people. Without blinking.
We must surely ask whether lies of this magnitude, leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of innocents, fall in the same category as a lie about a sexual liason with an intern. If the latter deserved impeachment, does it follow that the former deserves perhaps a hard, uncomfortable chair in a corner of eternal hell?
But never mind George W. Bush. People who have taken the time to study his record already know that he has never shied away from a lie that resulted in any kind of personal gain. Look at his military record and wonder at the gall of his showing up in flight gear on an aircraft carrier to talk as the "warrior king," just as if he had honorably served himself. Unless we were living in caves, or unless we fell into the group who couldn't keep Saddam and Osama (Osama bin Forgotten?) straight and still think the 9–11 hijackers were from Iraq, we knew that Bush habitually runs short on anything even vaguely resembling honesty. Even then, we allowed rings to be placed in our noses and didn't squeak when they were jerked.
And now the lies are out there for everyone to see. So what are we to do? News of Laci Peterson's murder is old hat now, leaving us pacing around for new adventure, new reality TV, a new sex scandal. We can get miffed about the 10 Americans killed in the suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia, but we have to be careful not to conclude that the slaughter of innocent Iraqis led to the bombings.
What won't go away, no matter how many sensational stories network television tries to seduce us with, are facts that growing numbers of Americans are having to swallow: knowledge of the forged documents purporting to show Iraq had bought uranium ore from Niger, bugging the UN offices of countries that didn't jump when Bush snapped his fingers, claims that intelligence analysts were forced to stretch facts to fit the theories of superiors at the White House, Pentagon and vice president's office. They're just sitting there, sticking out like a gross blemish on the face as you head out the door to your senior prom.
It's serious. We have this pile of lies now, and there are these piles of bodies in Iraq, and there are these non-piles of chemical and biological weapons that must have zoomed up to heaven in a sneak preview of rapture, and we have to do something if we ever hope to take the family to Europe again and tell the people we meet where we're from. What on earth do we do about the whole mess? Something better than blaming the French and pouring $40 bottles of wine in the streets because France told us to stop the damned jingoism.
We can shop! That's what we can do. We have a leader who tells us to shop until we drop and the economy will improve, as corporate bottom lines improve and make the CEOs more receptive to hiring a few more minimum-wage employees. If we shop hard enough we can perhaps forget that we murdered tens of thousands of innocent people because we were so apathetic that we simply believed the lies that were spoon-fed to us without checking them out. How many "true believing patriots" know anything about the PNAC (Project for a New American Century) and the intentions of the far right in this country to control the globe. One suggestion for coming out of the coma is to try looking at that one, in their own words, at:http://www.newamericancentury.org/
But 56 percent of the people in this country, even after admitting that the stories of weapons of mass destruction were false, still insist it was a good idea to go kill Iraq, because Saddam was a bad guy (Of course he was a bad guy; he was originally our guy, just like Noriega, Osama bin Laden, Pinochet, Somoza, Batista and almost all members of the bad-guy club)—more than half the people in this country. These are the people, of course, who fell for the business about there being a "coalition of the willing," those unwilling to dig in and find out that the "coalition" was made up of the U.S., UK and those we could threaten or buy off.
These people polled may legitimately feel good that we've rid the world of one dictator even if his people do starve this summer and spawn a thousand future terrorists to go after our grandchildren, even if the depleted uranium has yielded a million-year wasteland, even if kids are still dying every day from the human-rights-condemned cluster bombs that leave little bomblets that look like toys. These people may think it's our right to kill a country if its leader is repressive and a general thug, as was Saddam. But I wonder about the families of the 130 American soldiers who died in Iraq. Do they perhaps wish our president [sic] had told the truth? I wonder if the mothers of those thousand kids we killed are rejoicing in their "liberation." What about our soldiers over there now, fearing for their lives as they see the hate in the eyes of those they "liberated."
What fools we have all been. And what bigger fools we are not to now admit that we were snookered and that possibly George W. Bush may not be the Messiah after all. Who came out happy? We must ask ourselves who came out happy? Defense contractors, the oil oligarchy and companies like Dick Cheney's Halliburton, who are making millions on contracts to rebuild Iraq—contracts not up for public bidding. Cheney is still, by the way, on the Halliburton payroll, a cool million a year. Maybe that didn't have anything to do with Halliburton getting such juicy contracts; maybe being good-looking didn't have anything to do with Brad Pitt breaking into movies; maybe a high IQ didn't have anything to do with Einstein's preoccupation with relativity.
There are fortunes being made on the results of these phantom weapons of mass destruction that whushed off into a black hole as soon as U.S. soldiers got control of the oilfields. And the fortunes are not being made in the smallest way by the families who sent their sons to die in the desert, either.
But who gets the prize? Most Heinous Crime of the New Millenium. In a pool of a thousand atrocities, who, in the end, is the guiltiest, the lowest, the slimiest and truest representatives of heinous crimes? Perhaps those who sit back and, even knowing that we allowed our country to massacre thousands on the basis of lies, just let it go while they focus on their Big Macs. Those who won't take to the streets when Bush goes after the next country on his list (probably after the election). The guy down in Texas with the huge yard sign that says, "Iraq today, France tomorrow."
This was just the beginning, a testing of waters. If you doubt the oracle, go back and read the papers issued by the PNAC. Bush showed the world just how big his guns were, and those questioning him have taken a silent step backward. The U.S. power to financially cripple a country is staggering. Its power to blow them out of existence is now well demonstrated as well. And we let it happen, some with immense pride.
Are we feeling bad yet? Does a triple thick milkshake curdle in our throats yet?
The inimitable Mark Morford answers it best (SF Gate, May 14, 2003):
"Because now it's all done. Like a bad trip to the dentist where your routine cleaning turned out to be a bloody excruciating root canal and 50 hours of high-pitched drilling and $100 billion in god-awful cosmetic surgery, now the bandages come off. Smile, sucker. We're at peace once again. Sort of. But not really. Don't you feel better now? No? Too bad. No one cares what you think."
Lisa Walsh Thomas is a veteran activist against human atrocities. Her forthcoming book of essays and poetry, "The Girl with Yellow Flowers in Her Hair," will be available through Pitchfork Press, New Jersey, ([email protected]) by the end of this month.
posted on May 29, 2003 06:57:18 PM new
Wacko meter is right on! I heard it all the way down the block and had to log on to see what was going on!
Just as I expected another 60's hippy conspiracy theorist.
George Bush did what was right. That thug and is gang killed thousands of innocent people. How could you possibly, in your wildest imagination, take up for this degenerate and try to make our country out to be evil? Its UNBELIEVABLE.
Thank God for George Bush, lets move onto Syria and Iran next term.
posted on May 29, 2003 07:22:13 PM new
Boy, you guys don't waste any time, calling people with differing opinions, wackos. Is that the best you can do?
ECHANICSBURG, Pa. — It was no surprise that President Bush, lacking smoking-gun evidence of Iraq's weapons programs, used his State of the Union address to re-emphasize the moral case for an invasion: "The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured."
The accusation that Iraq has used chemical weapons against its citizens is a familiar part of the debate. The piece of hard evidence most frequently brought up concerns the gassing of Iraqi Kurds at the town of Halabja in March 1988, near the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. President Bush himself has cited Iraq's "gassing its own people," specifically at Halabja, as a reason to topple Saddam Hussein.
But the truth is, all we know for certain is that Kurds were bombarded with poison gas that day at Halabja. We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds. This is not the only distortion in the Halabja story.
I am in a position to know because, as the Central Intelligence Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. In addition, I headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States; the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.
This much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtedly know: it came about in the course of a battle between Iraqis and Iranians. Iraq used chemical weapons to try to kill Iranians who had seized the town, which is in northern Iraq not far from the Iranian border. The Kurdish civilians who died had the misfortune to be caught up in that exchange. But they were not Iraq's main target.
And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.
The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent — that is, a cyanide-based gas — which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.
These facts have long been in the public domain but, extraordinarily, as often as the Halabja affair is cited, they are rarely mentioned. A much-discussed article in The New Yorker last March did not make reference to the Defense Intelligence Agency report or consider that Iranian gas might have killed the Kurds. On the rare occasions the report is brought up, there is usually speculation, with no proof, that it was skewed out of American political favoritism toward Iraq in its war against Iran.
I am not trying to rehabilitate the character of Saddam Hussein. He has much to answer for in the area of human rights abuses. But accusing him of gassing his own people at Halabja as an act of genocide is not correct, because as far as the information we have goes, all of the cases where gas was used involved battles. These were tragedies of war. There may be justifications for invading Iraq, but Halabja is not one of them.
In fact, those who really feel that the disaster at Halabja has bearing on today might want to consider a different question: Why was Iran so keen on taking the town? A closer look may shed light on America's impetus to invade Iraq.
We are constantly reminded that Iraq has perhaps the world's largest reserves of oil. But in a regional and perhaps even geopolitical sense, it may be more important that Iraq has the most extensive river system in the Middle East. In addition to the Tigris and Euphrates, there are the Greater Zab and Lesser Zab rivers in the north of the country. Iraq was covered with irrigation works by the sixth century A.D., and was a granary for the region.
Before the Persian Gulf war, Iraq had built an impressive system of dams and river control projects, the largest being the Darbandikhan dam in the Kurdish area. And it was this dam the Iranians were aiming to take control of when they seized Halabja. In the 1990's there was much discussion over the construction of a so-called Peace Pipeline that would bring the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates south to the parched Gulf states and, by extension, Israel. No progress has been made on this, largely because of Iraqi intransigence. With Iraq in American hands, of course, all that could change.
Thus America could alter the destiny of the Middle East in a way that probably could not be challenged for decades — not solely by controlling Iraq's oil, but by controlling its water. Even if America didn't occupy the country, once Mr. Hussein's Baath Party is driven from power, many lucrative opportunities would open up for American companies.
All that is needed to get us into war is one clear reason for acting, one that would be generally persuasive. But efforts to link the Iraqis directly to Osama bin Laden have proved inconclusive. Assertions that Iraq threatens its neighbors have also failed to create much resolve; in its present debilitated condition — thanks to United Nations sanctions — Iraq's conventional forces threaten no one.
Perhaps the strongest argument left for taking us to war quickly is that Saddam Hussein has committed human rights atrocities against his people. And the most dramatic case are the accusations about Halabja.
Before we go to war over Halabja, the administration owes the American people the full facts. And if it has other examples of Saddam Hussein gassing Kurds, it must show that they were not pro-Iranian Kurdish guerrillas who died fighting alongside Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Until Washington gives us proof of Saddam Hussein's supposed atrocities, why are we picking on Iraq on human rights grounds, particularly when there are so many other repressive regimes Washington supports?
Stephen C. Pelletiere is author of "Iraq and the International Oil System: Why America Went to War in the Persian Gulf."
posted on May 29, 2003 09:04:45 PM new
So, after reading Helen & junque's informative posts, all you can say is "That leftist manifesto of stupidity is ridiculous"?? Nobody is claiming outing Saddam is wrong, it's the other 99% that's objectionable.
posted on May 30, 2003 09:35:23 AM new
The most heinous act,Going after the wrong people, for revenge of 9/11.
Killing thousands who never knew where New York was on a map,or really cared.
Talking was out of the question,we had to attack right away because of all those WOMD,We had to hit fast and hard,and all the smart missiles
were targeted for just the bad guys,and there would be few civilian casualties.The leaders forgot to mention they would be using cluster bombs all over baghdad.
Now all the God fearing hypocrites
are thumping their Bibles, and saying God willed it...Show me proof,God or Jesus had anything to do with this massacre.
Jesus would have never taken sides of a war,or condone war of any kind.His children, of the flock were killed and maimed.
Destroying Arabs,out of fear is sayin God didnt know what he was doing,and we will fix that problem.Not being able to see another persons point of view,or their suffering,or their hunger, is scripture blindness.Doesnt matter how many times you read that Bible,Some people never get it.
This idolts war, was never about us....Now we have struck,it is about us..We are trapped ,Our people are in real danger over there.
posted on May 30, 2003 09:55:24 AM new
Nobody is arguing Saddam Hussein isn't (wasn't) evil. He is.
Nobody is arguing that Iraqi people were being oppressed.
Did he have weapons of mass destruction? Who knows?
And therein lies the problem. The Bush administration had to say something to justify the billions of dollars spent and the lives they knew would be wasted - some way to set Iraq apart from all the other nations where people are suffering under oppressive regimes, in many cases worse than Iraq. (Ask yourself where you'd rather be: Iraq or Sierra Leone?)
They couldn't state the real reason: That Iraq is sitting on the second-largest (perhaps the largest) untapped oil reserve in the world. So they lied. It's a lie that goes far beyond "I did not have sex with that woman." It's a massive lie that brought the federal budget to its knees and hundreds of Americans home on stretchers and in body bags.
posted on May 30, 2003 03:42:43 PM new
"Who cares about weapons of mass destruction." Given the fact that the weapons of mass destruction were one of the two main rationales for going to war,(along with the unproven al qaida connection). All Americans should care deeply. We started a preemptive war based on the wmds. The war has already cost near 100 billion dollars, and this is just the beginning. Thousands of Iraqi children have been killed or maimed. Our nations credibility around the world has been damaged. Our soldiers have been killed and wounded and are still being killed and wounded. Many will develop "gulf war syndrome" illness due to exposure to the spent uranium used in our missles, as will many Iraqis for years to come. The veterans of the first gulf war have been plagued by this. We have alienated countries that have been our allies for centuries. If the Bush administration wanted to go to war with Saddam because he was an evil dictator, so be it, but it would have been a bit more difficult to get congress and the American people to go along with this. Much easier to evoke frightening images of mushroom clouds,( based on forged documents) anthrax etc. According to a Parade magazine article by David Wallichinsky, our "allies" in Saudi Arabia rank #2 in terms of being the most repressive dictatorial regime on earth, but our government has many cozy "business" relationships with them, not to mention our trading partner China, which enjoys "most favored nation" trading status. Remember the Tienemen Square slaughter, where Chinese students carrying a model of our Statue of Liberty were mowed down? how about Pinochet of Chile or the Shah of Iran, or the death squads of El Salvador. The list goes on and on. Quite obviously, other dynamics are at work, besides liberating the Iraqis from a brutal dictator. The USA has never been squemish about supporting the most brutal dictators financially and militarily, including Saddam in the 1980s. We, under the leadership of Rumsfeld and others, armed him to the teeth, with the weapons (including the poison gas he used against the Kurds). He was then seen as a bulwark against Iran and Islamic fundamentalism. To send our country to war based on false claims, and to then state that these claims don't matter is outrageous! Be a real patriot, seek the truth!!
WMD just a convenient excuse for war, admits Wolfowitz
By David Usborne
30 May 2003
The Bush administration focused on alleged weapons of mass destruction as the primary justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force because it was politically convenient, a top-level official at the Pentagon has acknowledged.
The extraordinary admission comes in an interview with Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Defence Secretary, in the July issue of the magazine Vanity Fair.
Mr Wolfowitz also discloses that there was one justification that was "almost unnoticed but huge". That was the prospect of the United States being able to withdraw all of its forces from Saudi Arabia once the threat of Saddam had been removed. Since the taking of Baghdad, Washington has said that it is taking its troops out of the kingdom. "Just lifting that burden from the Saudis is itself going to the door" towards making progress elsewhere in achieving Middle East peace, Mr Wolfowitz said. The presence of the US military in Saudi Arabia has been one of the main grievances of al-Qa'ida and other terrorist groups.
"For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on," Mr Wolfowitz tells the magazine.
The comments suggest that, even for the US administration, the logic that was presented for going to war may have been an empty shell. They come to light, moreover, just two days after Mr Wolfowitz's immediate boss, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, conceded for the first time that the arms might never be found.
The failure to find a single example of the weapons that London and Washington said were inside Iraq only makes the embarrassment more acute. Voices are increasingly being raised in the US and Britain demanding an explanation for why nothing has been found.
Most striking is the fact that these latest remarks come from Mr Wolfowitz, recognised widely as the leader of the hawks' camp in Washington most responsible for urging President George Bush to use military might in Iraq. The magazine article reveals that Mr Wolfowitz was even pushing Mr Bush to attack Iraq immediately after the 11 September attacks in the US, instead of invading Afghanistan.
There have long been suspicions that Mr Wolfowitz has essentially been running a shadow administration out of his Pentagon office, ensuring that the right-wing views of himself and his followers find their way into the practice of American foreign policy. He is best known as the author of the policy of first-strike pre-emption in world affairs that was adopted by Mr Bush shortly after the al-Qa'ida attacks.
In asserting that weapons of mass destruction gave a rationale for attacking Iraq that was acceptable to everyone, Mr Wolfowitz was presumably referring in particular to the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell. He was the last senior member of the administration to agree to the push earlier this year to persuade the rest of the world that removing Saddam by force was the only remaining viable option.
The conversion of Mr Powell was on full view in the UN Security Council in February when he made a forceful presentation of evidence that allegedly proved that Saddam was concealing weapons of mass destruction.
Critics of the administration and of the war will now want to know how convinced the Americans really were that the weapons existed in Iraq to the extent that was publicly stated. Questions are also multiplying as to the quality of the intelligence provided to the White House. Was it simply faulty given that nothing has been found in Iraq or was it influenced by the White House's fixation on the weapons issue? Or were the intelligence agencies telling the White House what it wanted to hear?
This week, Sam Nunn, a former senator, urged Congress to investigate whether the argument for war in Iraq was based on distorted intelligence. He raised the possibility that Mr Bush's policy against Saddam had influenced the intelligence that indicated Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction.
This week, the CIA and the other American intelligence agencies have promised to conduct internal reviews of the quality of the material they supplied the administration on what was going on in Iraq. The heat on the White House was only made fiercer by Mr Rumsfeld's admission that nothing may now be found in Iraq to back up those earlier claims, if only because the Iraqis may have got rid of any evidence before the conflict.
"It is also possible that they decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict," the Defence Secretary said.
posted on May 30, 2003 05:57:13 PM new
RIGHT ON FERNCREST! These type of propgandist hate this country and thrive on a buffet of stupidity.
I think whatever this nutcake Stephanie has to say sums it up when she say Iraq was the worst atrocity. She forgets seeing flaming people jumping naked from windows and their children crying for mommy and daddy?. This kind of people lure in the weak minded with their endless diatribe of nonsense
posted on May 30, 2003 08:13:20 PM new
orleans - I appreciate your shared viewpoint. 9/11 HAS to matter to someone.
As to the U.S.' action against Saddam's regime, we've already found ties between Baghdad and al-Qaida. We'll find the weapons of mass destruction, too - there's no rush.
posted on May 31, 2003 06:46:21 AM new
eegnats - "Extraordinary admission"????? "WMD just a convenient excuse for war, admits Wolfowitz"?????
Your David Usborne uses the July issue of Vanity Fair for his report. Is he one of the lazy reporters that Wm Kristol refers to? Read this url for a different 'take' on what Wolfowitz really said:
[i]For the last 12 years, all specific and sometimes heated policy disagreements notwithstanding, American presidents of both parties, joining a near-unanimous consensus of the so-called "world community," have agreed that the Baath party regime's persistent and never-fully-disclosed WMD program represented a grave threat to international security. Al Gore, for example, in his much-hyped antiwar speech last September, acknowledged that "Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to completely deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power. We know he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country." The notion that the Bush administration's prewar reiteration of this view was a cynical ploy is crackpot.
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The failure so far to discover "stocks" of WMD material in post-Saddam Iraq raises legitimate questions about the quality of U.S. and allied intelligence--though no one doubts that Saddam's regime had weapons of mass destruction, used weapons of mass destruction, and had an ongoing program to develop more such weapons. Furthermore, people of good will are entitled to disagree, even in retrospect, about the wisdom and probable effects of Saddam's forcible removal. But distorting an on-the-record interview with a Bush administration official in order to create a quasi-conspiratorial narrative of deceit and deception at the highest levels of the U.S. government is a disgrace.
Pentagon staffers were wise enough to tape-record the Tanenhaus-Wolfowitz interview. Prior to publication of the Vanity Fair piece, they made that transcript available to its author. And they have since posted the transcript on the Defense Department's website (www.defenselink.mil). Tanenhaus's assertion that Wolfowitz "admitted" that "Iraq's WMD had never been the most important casus belli" turns out to be, not to put too fine a point on it, false.
William Kristol
