US withdraws Iraq weapon-hunters as WMD lies crumble
By Bill Vann
10 January 2004
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The Pentagon has carried out the furtive withdrawal from Iraq of a
400-member military unit assigned to hunt for stockpiles of weapons of
mass destruction (WMD) just as a series of reports have surfaced
definitively exposing the Bush administration’s claims about alleged
Iraqi WMD.
A 107-page report issued Thursday by the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, a Washington-based establishment think tank,
presented a documented case that “Administration officials
systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq’s nuclear, chemical
and biological weapons programs and ballistic missile programs.
The Washington Post, meanwhile, published a January 7 article
resulting from an exhaustive investigation by its reporter Barton
Gellman concluding that “investigators have found no support for the
two main fears expressed in London and Washington before the war: that
Iraq had a hidden arsenal of old weapons and built advanced programs
for new ones.”
Finally, questioned at a news conference on Thursday about whether he
regretted making his fraudulent claims about WMD and Baghdad-terrorist
ties before the United Nations Security Council last February,
Secretary of State Colin Powell acknowledged: “I have not seen a
smoking gun, concrete evidence about the connection,” between Al-Qaeda
and the Saddam Hussein regime that he and others in the administration
claimed in the run-up to the war.
Taken together, these developments constitute a damning indictment of
the administration’s claims that the invasion and US occupation of the
Middle Eastern country was necessary to “disarm” the regime of Saddam
Hussein and defend the US from attack. They confirm once again that
the Bush White House lied in order to drag the American people into an
illegal war whose real aim was to impose US hegemony over the
strategic oil-producing region.
News of the withdrawal of the military’s Joint Captured Materiel
Exploitation Group was leaked to the New York Times and only later
confirmed by the White House. The Times reported: “The step was
described by some military officials as a sign that the administration
might have lowered its sights and no longer expected to uncover the
caches of chemical and biological weapons that the White House cited
as a principal reason for going to war last March.”
The article quoted Pentagon officials as saying that the unit was
withdrawn “because its work was essentially done.”
It added that, while another 1,400-member unit, the Iraq Survey Group,
remained in Iraq with the mission of disposing of chemical and
biological weapons, a member of the group had confirmed that it is
“still waiting for something to dispose of.”
Having spent over nine months and hundreds of millions of dollars in a
farcical search for non-existent weapons, the unit is increasingly
turning its attention to intelligence operations against the growing
Iraqi resistance to the US occupation. Moreover, the official tapped
by the Bush administration to head the survey group, David Kay,
revealed last month that he is preparing to quit his position and
return to the private sector.
Kay, a right-wing Republican and former Reagan-era Pentagon official,
was a veteran of CIA provocations against Iraq and one of the most
enthusiastic proponents of the Bush administration’s program of
“regime change.” If there existed any possibility whatsoever that
weapons caches were to be found, he would not be quitting his post.
Former deputy chairman of the UN weapons inspection agency Charles
Duelfer told NBC news Thursday: “I think Mr. Kay and his team have
looked very hard. I think the reason they haven’t found it is it’s
probably not there.”
Significantly, the Times buried its article on the withdrawal of the
weapons-hunting unit on the bottom of page 14, while it virtually
ignored the Carnegie report. The disinterest in these developments
stood in sharp contrast to the newspaper’s sensationalizing of false
claims of existing weapons in Iraq in the months leading up to the
invasion as well as phony stories about alleged discovery of weapons
materials in its immediate aftermath.
The newspaper’s senior reporter, Judith Miller, was herself “embedded”
with one of the Pentagon’s weapons-hunting teams, both serving as a
conduit for administration propaganda over alleged WMD and, according
to published reports, even manipulating the operations of the unit
itself to promote a pro-war political agenda.
The Times treatment of these exposures was typical of the media as a
whole. With tens of thousands of Iraqis killed and maimed and nearly
500 US military personnel having lost their lives in the Bush
administration’s criminal enterprise, the collective reaction of the
US political establishment and the major news outlets was the
equivalent of a bored shrug.
The fact that the Bush administration lied to the American public and
manufactured a non-existent threat in a bid to suppress mass
opposition to war is certainly not a surprise to anyone who has
followed political developments over the past year. Before the war,
Washington’s WMD claims were rejected by most governments as well as
the tens of millions of people who demonstrated in cities across the
globe against the impending US invasion.
Yet, the information that is now emerging is so conclusive that it
ends any debate on the administration’s phony WMD claims.
Investigators found nothing
Based on extensive interviews with both US investigators and Iraqi
scientists, the Washington Post, which pursued an editorial policy in
clear support of the war, found that Iraq not only did not possess any
of the claimed weapons, but also lacked the material conditions to
even create them. Its scientific institutions and factories had been
“thoroughly beaten down by 12 years of conflict, arms embargo and
strangling economic sanctions,” the Post found.
“[I]nvestigators said they have discovered no work on former
germ-warfare agents...that led US scientists on a highly classified
hunt for several months... And they found the former nuclear weapons
program, described as a ‘grave and gathering danger’ by President Bush
and a ‘mortal threat’ by Vice President Cheney, in much the same
shattered state left by UN inspectors in the 1990s,” the Post
reported.
The article further described US occupation officials rounding up and
interrogating Iraqi scientists engaged in civilian research without
turning up any new evidence of weapons programs.
The Post also cited an internal Iraqi government memo establishing
that Iraq had destroyed all of its biological weapons in 1991, in the
aftermath of the Persian Gulf War.
Finally, putting to rest the false claims made by the CIA and other
government agencies last May that two trucks found by US troops in
northern Iraq were “mobile germ-weapon factories,” the article
included an interview with an engineer who managed the government
contract for maintaining the vehicles. He confirmed that they were
used to manufacture hydrogen used in weather balloons, an explanation
US officials had dismissed as a “cover story.” A former senior manager
at the firm that held the contract—now the US-appointed director of
the same company—gave the same account.
The Carnegie Endowment report
(http://www.ceip.org/files/Publications/IraqReport3.asp?from=pubdate)
consists of an exhaustive examination of the administration’s claims
and intelligence reports about alleged Iraqi weapons capabilities in
the period preceding the war.
It establishes that beginning in mid-2002, US government “statements
of the [Iraqi] threat shifted dramatically toward greater alarm
regarding certainty of the threat and greater certainty as to the
evidence. This shift does not appear to have been supported by new,
concrete evidence from intelligence community reports... These
statements were picked up and amplified by congressional leaders,
major media and some experts.”
The report also confirms that Vice President Richard Cheney and other
administration officials exerted “unusually intense” pressure on
intelligence agencies to include “evidence” to justify a war in the
production of the US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in October
2002.
“This is indicated by the Vice President’s repeated visits to CIA
headquarters and demands for access to the raw intelligence from which
analysts were working,” the report states. “Also notable is the
unusual speed with which the NIE was written and the high number of
dissents in what is designed to be a consensus document. Finally,
there is the fact that the political appointees in the Department of
Defense set up their own intelligence operation reportedly out of
dissatisfaction with the caveated judgments being reached by
intelligence professionals.”
Reviewing the administration’s claims—that Iraq was building a nuclear
weapon, had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons,
missiles capable of delivering them against Israel or even the US
itself, and was linked to the Al-Qaeda terrorist network—the report
concludes that every one of them was demonstrably false.
The conclusion of the Carnegie report poses the question: “Did
administration officials misrepresent what was known and not known
based on intelligence? If so, what were the sources and reasons for
these misrepresentations?”
It answers the first question in the affirmative: “Administration
officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq’s
nuclear, chemical and biological weapon programs and ballistic missile
programs.”
Yet, the report delicately describes this wholesale lying to the
American people as a “source of misunderstanding” and leaves its
second question as to the reasons for these lies unanswered.
In the end, the Carnegie document reflects misgivings within the US
establishment over some of the tactics and methods used by the Bush
administration—the public embrace of preventive war as an
international policy, contempt for multilateral institutions like the
UN, etc.—rather than any fundamental difference with the pursuit of a
foreign policy aimed at asserting US hegemony over the world’s vital
resources. Significantly, the word “oil” does not appear once in the
document.
No section of the political establishment—including all of the
candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination—is prepared to
draw the stark political conclusions that flow from these recent
exposures: top government officials deliberately lied to the American
people about the reasons for war and launched an unjustified and
unprovoked act of aggression that continues to claim the lives of both
Iraqis and Americans on a daily basis.
These are not “misunderstandings,” but war crimes in which not only
Bush, but every major institution of the US ruling elite—Congress, the
corporations, the media and both major political parties—are
implicated.
The demand for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all US
troops from Iraq must be joined with the call for a genuinely
independent inquiry into the official deception that preceded the war,
leading to the impeachment and criminal prosecution of those
responsible.
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