| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Tom Jefferson" |
| Date: |
29 Oct 2003 07:34:03 PM |
| Object: |
No WMD, no problem, turn up the volume and ignore the facts. |
Not only did Iraq not have any WMD, but they wouldn't have been a threat if
they did. They had more sense than the Bush administration in that they
didn't kill tens of thousands, wound many more while spending billions of
dollars of their citizens money to perpetrate it and then attempt a
cover-up. For all the politicians who supported Bush's invasion of Iraq I
wish you the same misery that you have brought down on the head of the
Iraqis and if you won't hold Bush responsible for his pre-emptive invasion
of Iraq based on phony intel and warmongering propaganda there is slight
difference between you and the terrorists you claim to be fighting.
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"(Saddam Hussein) had a weapons program, he's disguised a weapons program,
he had ambitions."
President Bush
--------------------------------------------------------------------
WMD Hunt May Be Back-Burnered
WASHINGTON, Oct. 29, 2003
(CBS/AP) U.S. officials are considering shifting intelligence resources from
hunting for Iraq's alleged illegal weapons to tracking the fighters
attacking U.S. troops, a newspaper reports.
According to The New York Times, the Bush administration is considering
transferring some intelligence officers and linguists from the weapons hunt
to counterterrorism efforts. But officials stressed that the possible move
would not signal the end of the weapons search.
The central argument in the case for war was the claim that Iraq had
chemical and biological weapons and a program to develop nuclear weapons. To
date, U.S. teams have discovered neither weapons nor active programs to
produce them, raising doubts about the rationale for the March invasion.
On Tuesday, a top U.S. intelligence official said Iraq may have moved
weapons into Syria before the U.S. invaded, and President Bush defended his
decision to attack.
But a former intelligence official claims the intelligence on Iraq was
flawed.
In the weapons debate, a key question has been whether intelligence agencies
provided bad data or the Bush administration politicized the information it
received.
Carl W. Ford Jr., former assistant secretary of State for intelligence and
research, told the Los Angeles Times in Wednesday's editions that U.S.
intelligence "badly underperformed" on assessing Iraq's weapons threat.
"The information we were giving the policy community was off the mark," Ford
said. He rejected charges that the Bush administration misused the
intelligence.
That echoed a recent report that the Senate Intelligence Committee is
preparing to fault intelligence agencies, especially the CIA, for using too
much disputed, circumstantial or single-source data in preparing its
estimates of Iraq's alleged weapons programs.
The CIA rejects criticism of the way it presented information on Iraq. The
agency is preparing an internal review, expected in late November, of its
intelligence work leading up to the war.
In their public advocacy for war, Bush administration officials often
appeared to beyond what the CIA told them.
Administration officials rarely acknowledged qualifications the CIA included
in its reports on Iraq's alleged nuclear activities, unmanned aerial
vehicles and doctrine for using weapons of mass destruction.
Twice in the fall of 2002, the CIA prevented White House officials from
making the claim that Iraq tried to buy uranium in Africa. But the
allegation made it into the president's State of the Union and other
officials' public remarks. It was only withdrawn this summer.
A former top State Department intelligence official, Greg Thielmann, told
CBS News' 60 Minutes II that contrary to what Secretary of State Colin
Powell told the United Nations, Iraq didn't pose an imminent threat to
anyone: "I think it didn't even constitute an imminent threat to its
neighbors at the time we went to war."
In early October, chief U.S. weapons hunter David Kay told Congress his
Iraqi Survey Group has uncovered evidence of "dozens of WMD-related program
activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the
United Nations."
Kay said his team had found signs that Iraq maintained capabilities that
"could be activated quickly to surge the production of BW agents," but
discovered no weapons. Kay said Iraq had plans to produce longer-flying
missiles, but he produced no evidence of an active chemical or nuclear
weapons program.
Mr. Bush said Tuesday that Kay's report demonstrated "Saddam Hussein was in
material breach of 1441, which would have been casus belli. In other words,
he had a weapons program, he's disguised a weapons program, he had
ambitions."
The president stressed Kay was still searching for weapons. His final report
is not expected until next year.
One possibility Kay is exploring is whether Iraq sent weapons out of the
country before the war. A senior military intelligence chief suggested
Tuesday that Iraqi officials might have shipped the weapons across frontiers
without the knowledge of Saddam Hussein.
James R. Clapper, who heads the National Imagery and Mapping Agency,
described his theory as an educated hunch.
Before and during the war, U.S. intelligence tracked a large number of
vehicles, mostly civilian trucks, moving from Iraq into Syria, Clapper said.
What was in them is unknown, although he suggested they may have contained
materiel related to Iraq's weapons programs.
But some other intelligence officials have previously said they have no
conclusive evidence of Iraq moving weapons to Syria or elsewhere.
Clapper also suggested that some items from Iraq's weapons programs may have
been destroyed or hidden in the run-up to the war. He pointed to the
discovery of buried Iraqi fighter jets as evidence that members of Saddam's
government sought to hide things from invading U.S. and allied forces.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/06/25/iraq/main560449.shtml
--
"From the brief time that we did spend occupying Iraqi territory after the
war, I am certain that had we taken all of Iraq, we would have been like the
dinosaur in the tar pit – we would still be there, and we, not the United
Nations, would be bearing the costs of the occupation. This is a burden I am
sure the beleaguered American taxpayer would not have been happy to take
on."
– Norman Schwarzkopf, from his 1993 autobiography, "It Doesn't Take a Hero."
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