Bush administration's dire prewar pronouncements about Iraq still not
borne out
By JOHN J. LUMPKIN
WASHINGTON (AP) - Before the war, the U.S. administration portrayed
Iraq as full of killer poisons with strange names and deadly effects,
which terrorists could get hold of and unleash on American cities.
The administration also contended that many of the weapons were ready
to be used on the battlefield. U.S. commanders prepared by having
soldiers wear protective gear whenever an alert sounded a possible
weapons attack.
Those claims and fears have not been borne out so far.
Was the intelligence regarding Iraq inaccurate or distorted between
when it was gathered and presented to the world?
Congress is looking into the matter. Prime Minister Tony Blair's
government in Britain is facing similar scrutiny.
A former State Department intelligence official, who viewed classified
intelligence gathered by the CIA and other agencies about Iraq's
chemical, biological and nuclear programs during the run-up to the
war, accused the administration of distorting intelligence and
presenting conjecture as fact.
"What disturbs me deeply is what I think are the disingenuous
statements made from the very top about what the intelligence did
say," said Greg Thielmann, who retired in September. He was director
of the strategic, proliferation and military issues office in the
State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
On Friday, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency acknowledged he
had no hard evidence of Iraqi chemical weapons last fall but believed
Iraq had a program in place to produce them. The assessment suggests
greater uncertainty about the Iraqi threat than the administration
indicated publicly.
CIA Director George Tenet, Secretary of State Colin Powell and top
Pentagon officials have defended their pieces of the intelligence
picture, saying they provided accurate assessments.
Many top U.S. officials contend their prewar assertions will yet be
borne out. They say Iraq remains too dangerous to conduct a thorough
search, but a new hunt is getting underway.
Prewar statements from President George W. Bush, Powell and
intelligence officials offered many of the specific conclusions that
drove the United States and Britain to invade Iraq. Most have yet to
be validated.
"Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of
between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent," Powell said at
the United Nations in February.
In a paper released in October, U.S. intelligence agencies said that
Iraq had begun "renewed production of chemical warfare agents,"
probably including mustard, sarin, cyclosarin and VX.
Chemical weapons have not been found in the part of Iraq that was
controlled by President Saddam Hussein's government.
Intelligence officials said Saddam would disperse his chemical weapons
among his Iraqi Republican Guard units, which would use them if the
government were about to fall. This apparently did not happen.
Powell suggested military units had biological weapons in the field.
On May 30, Lt.-Gen. James Conway, the top marine in Iraq, said,
speaking about the hunt for chemical and biological weapons: "We've
been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti
border and Baghdad, but they're simply not there."
The prewar intelligence paper said Iraq had established "a
large-scale, redundant and concealed" biological weapon agent
production capability, which included mobile facilities.
Allied forces in Iraq have found two truck trailers equipped with
fermenters. The CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency said last week
they concluded the vehicles probably are parts of a mobile biological
weapons production facility. Bush seized on the finds as proof Iraq
had prohibited weapons.
No complete production system has been found, and tests showed no
trace of biological agents in either trailer.
Powell also had told the United Nations that "numerous intelligence
reports over the past decade from sources inside Iraq" indicated "a
covert force of up to a few dozen Scud-variant ballistic missiles."
None has been found.
U.S. allegations that Iraq was trying to develop a nuclear weapon have
also not been verified.
Much discussed were some high-strength aluminum tubes Iraq tried to
import. The CIA argued they were for centrifuges essential to a
nuclear weapons program. Experts from the State and Energy departments
said they were for conventional artillery rockets, Thielmann said.
No centrifuges have been reported found.
In his state of the union address, Bush said that Britain had learned
that Saddam "recently sought significant quantities of uranium from
Africa."
The claim rested significantly on a letter or letters between
officials in Iraq and Niger that were obtained by European
intelligence agencies. The communications are now accepted as forged.
The administration also suggested Iraq supported terrorists, including
members of al-Qaida.
The al-Qaida connection was built around the movements of Abu Musab
Zarqawi, a senior associate of Osama bin Laden. Zarqawi received
medical treatment in Baghdad in 2002 and supported an Islamic
extremist movement in Kurdish Iraq, outside Saddam's reach.
A midlevel associate of Zarqawi was detained near Baghdad after the
war. Zarqawi himself remains at large. Some reports indicated al-Qaida
operatives had sought chemical and biological weapons expertise from
Iraq, but there was little evidence Iraq supplied any.
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On the Net: Powell's address to the United Nations:
http://state.gov/p/nea/disarm/
Bush's Iraqi threat speech:
http://whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/10/20021007-8.html
URL of Article"
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/Iraq/2003/06/07/106078-ap.html
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