| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Harry Hope" |
| Date: |
10 Jan 2004 06:35:59 AM |
| Object: |
Iraqi WMD: Myths and ... more myths |
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FA10Ak01.html
Jan 10, 2004
Iraqi WMD: Myths and ... more myths
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON -
The administration of United States President George W Bush
"systematically misrepresented" the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of
mass destruction (WMD), three non-proliferation experts from a
prominent think tank charged on Thursday.
In a 107-page report, Jessica Mathews, Joseph Cirincione and George
Perkovich of the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace called for the creation of an independent commission to fully
investigate what the US intelligence community knew, or believed it
knew, about Iraq's WMD program from 1991 to 2003.
The probe should also determine whether intelligence analyses were
tainted by foreign intelligence agencies or political pressure, they
added.
"It is very likely that intelligence officials were pressured by
senior administration officials to conform their threat assessments to
pre-existing policies," Cirincione told reporters.
The Carnegie analysts also found "no solid evidence" of a cooperative
relationship between the government of ousted Iraqi president Saddam
Hussein and al-Qaeda, nor any evidence to support the claim that Iraq
would have transferred WMD to al-Qaeda under any circumstances.
"The notion that any government would give its principal security
assets to people it could not control in order to achieve its own
political aims is highly dubious," they wrote.
In addition, the report, titled "WMD in Iraq: Evidence and
Implications", concluded that the United Nations inspection process,
which was aborted when the agency withdrew its inspectors on the eve
of the US-led invasion of Iraq last March, "appears to have been much
more successful than recognized before the war".
The report, the most comprehensive public analysis so far of the
administration's WMD claims and what has been found in Iraq, will
certainly heat up the simmering controversy over whether Bush and his
top aides might have deliberately misled Congress and the public into
going to war.
While that controversy has cooled since last month's capture of Saddam
and a palpable rise in the military's confidence that it can subdue
the bloody insurgency against the occupation, two congressional
committees are only now resuming their own probes of US pre-war
intelligence on WMD, which were interrupted by the long Christmas
recess.
The report also comes amid new indications that the administration
itself has decided that its pre-war claims about Iraq's WMD were
wrong.
The New York Times reported on Thursday that a 400-member military
team has been quietly withdrawn from the 1,400-member Iraq Survey
Group that has spent months scouring Iraq at a cost of nearly US$1
billion for any evidence of such weapons.
That report followed another in mid-December that said ISG head David
Kay had told his superiors at the Central Intelligence Agency he
planned to leave as early as the end of January.
Kay, a former UN inspector who had long charged Saddam with holding
vast supplies of WMD, submitted an interim report last October that no
weapons had been found.
"I think it's pretty clear by now that they don't expect to find
anything at all," said one administration official.
The Carnegie report also comes on the heels of the publication
Wednesday of an extraordinarily lengthy article by the Washington Post
that concluded that Iraq's WMD programs were effectively abandoned
after the 1991 Gulf War.
The article, which confirmed that Iraq was developing new missile
technology, was based on interviews with the country's top weapons
scientists and mostly unnamed US and British investigators who went to
Iraq after the war.
The new report is likely to be taken as the most serious blow yet to
the administration's credibility.
Carnegie is the publisher of the journal Foreign Policy, and, while
its general political orientation is slightly left of center, it has
long been studiously non-partisan, and also houses right-wing figures,
such as neo-conservative writer Robert Kagan.
Carnegie president Mathews travelled to Iraq last September as part of
a bi-partisan group of highly respected national security analysts
invited by the Pentagon to assess the situation there.
The report, which is based on declassified documents about Iraq from
UN weapons inspectors and the International Atomic Energy Agency,
reaches a similar conclusion regarding both WMD and the missiles, but
is much broader in scope.
It concedes that Iraq's WMD programs could have resumed and might have
posed a long-term threat that could not be ignored.
But, the authors wrote, "they did not pose an immediate threat to the
United States, to the region or to global security".
Despite Vice President ***** Cheney's insistence early last year that
Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program, the Carnegie
report concludes there was "no convincing evidence" that it had done
so, and that this should have been known to US intelligence.
Similarly, with respect to Baghdad's chemical weapons, US intelligence
should have known that all facilities for producing them had been
effectively destroyed and that existing stockpiles had lost their
potency already by 1991.
Uncertainties regarding Iraq's biological weapons program were
greater, the report concludes.
Dual-use equipment and facilities, however, made it theoretically
possible for some limited production of both chemical and biological
weapons to occur.
As of the beginning of 2002, according to the report, the intelligence
community appears to have overestimated the chemical and biological
weapons in Iraq, but had a generally accurate picture of both the
nuclear and missile programmes.
But in 2002 the community appears to have made a "dramatic shift" in
its analyses.
The fact that this change coincided with the creation of the Office of
Special Plans in the Pentagon - a still-mysterious group of
intelligence analysts and consultants hired by prominent hawks to
assess the community's reporting - "suggests that the intelligence
community began to be unduly influenced by policymakers' views some
time in 2002", the report states.
But beyond the failures of the intelligence community, "administration
officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's WMD and
ballistic missile programs" in several ways, it adds.
They treated the three different kinds of WMD as a single threat when
they represented very different threats; insisted without evidence
that Saddam would give whatever WMD he had to terrorists; and
routinely omitted "caveats, probabilities and expressions of
uncertainty present in intelligence assessments from [their] public
statements".
In addition, the administration misrepresented findings by UN
inspectors "in ways that turned threats from minor to dire".
The report goes on to rebut a number of other administration claims,
arguing, for example, that the notion that Saddam was not "deterrable"
does not stand up to the historical record, given his past reaction to
international pressure.
The strategic implications of the failure of US intelligence to
provide accurate information on Iraq, when there was no imminent
threat, should call into question the administration's new national
security doctrine of pre-emptive military action, say the authors.
As applied in Iraq, the "doctrine is actually a loose standard for
preventive war under the cloak of legitimate pre-emption", they wrote,
and should be rescinded.
___________________________________________________________
Remind Us: Why Did Bush Invade Iraq?
http://www.kaicurry.com/gwbush/remindus.swf
Harry
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