An update on the WMD in Iraq allegations (nice one G-Dub)

[ellsworth81]

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Secretary of State Colin Powell Thursday defended the Bush administration's position that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction programs and defended his speech on the matter to the United Nations last February.

"This game is still unfolding," he told reporters.

He was responding to a study that found Iraq had ended its programs by the mid-1990s and did not pose an immediate threat to the United States before the 2003 war. Powell said he had not read the report but read news reports about it.

The study, released Thursday, was conducted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a nonpartisan, respected group that opposed the war in Iraq.

The United States used the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as a justification for launching the war against the regime of Saddam Hussein, according to the report.

The report follows a nine-month search in Iraq for WMD -- nuclear, biological and chemical -- the key reason the administration cited in its decision to invade Iraq.

"We looked at the intelligence assessment process, and we've come to the conclusion that it is broken," author Joseph Cirincione said Thursday on CNN's "American Morning."

"It is very likely that intelligence officials were pressured by senior administration officials to conform their threat assessments to pre-existing policies."

But Powell noted that Iraq used chemical weapons in the Iraq-Iran war and on the Kurds in the 1980s and had the chance to come clean about its programs to the international community through the '90s.

"It's a fact," he said.

He said there was a "solid case" from U.N. inspectors and other officials that the Saddam Hussein regime "was a danger we had to worry about."

"In terms of intention, you always had it," he said. "And anybody who thinks that Saddam Hussein last year was just, you know, waiting to give all of this up even though he was given the opportunity to do so, he didn't do it.

"What he was waiting to do is see if he could break the will of the international community, get rid of any potential for future inspections and get back to his intentions, which were to have weapons of mass destruction."

Powell said Saddam Hussein "kept the infrastructure, the programs intact."

"Where the debate is, is why haven't we found huge stockpiles and why haven't we found large caches of these weapons? Let's let the Iraqi Survey Group complete its work."

The secretary of state also said that his presentation to the United Nations last year made it clear that "we had seen some links and connections" between Iraq and terror groups "over time."

"I have not seen smoking gun concrete evidence about the connection, but I think the possibility of some connections did exist and was prudent to consider them at the time that we did."

But the report says that the "dramatic shift between prior intelligence assessments and the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), together with the creation of an independent intelligence entity at the Pentagon and other steps, suggest that the intelligence community began to be unduly influenced by policymakers' views sometime in 2002."

More than 1,000 U.S. inspectors have worked daily since before the war began in March, searching the country and interviewing scientists and other Iraqi officials, according to Cirincione.

"We found nothing," Cirincione said. "There are no large stockpiles of weapons. There hasn't actually been a find of a single weapon, a single weapons agent, nothing like the programs that the administration believe existed."

The Carnegie report based its conclusions on information gleaned from declassified U.S. intelligence documents about Iraq from U.N. weapons inspectors and the International Atomic Energy Agency, the nuclear watchdog agency for the United Nations. The endowment also said the study used statements from the Bush administration and corroborated reports from the news media.

The report also accuses the Bush administration of misrepresenting the threat from Iraqi WMD by "treating nuclear, chemical and biological weapons as a single 'WMD threat'" instead of characterizing the threats from the three types separately. It says the Bush administration also insisted "without evidence -- yet treating as a given truth -- that Saddam Hussein would give whatever WMD he possessed to terrorists."

Cirincione said the study "is the first comprehensive review of everything we knew or thought we knew about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and it turns out that some of the things we thought were working -- our threat assessments -- we're deeply flawed."

"We exaggerated the threat. We worst-cased it and then acted as if that worst case was the most likely case."

However, Cirincione also said other systems put in place to prohibit Saddam Hussein from developing weapons of mass destruction were working better than experts thought at the time.

Iraq's "programs were crippled by years of [U.N.] inspections and U.S. military strikes," he said, "and the sanctions that prevented them from getting anything going at all."

Cirincione said one reason for the apparent lack of progress in the Iraqi weapons programs was because Iraqi scientists were "telling Saddam that they were further along than they actually were."

"Apparently that was picked up by some of the Iraqi defectors who came to the U.S. telling stories of elaborate advanced weapons programs," he said.

"So the defectors were fooled, Saddam was fooled, but as it turns out Saddam himself had made the decision -- as far as we can tell -- in the mid-'90s to shut down these programs."

The Carnegie report isn't "a gotcha study" seeking to blame officials, Cirincione said. "We're trying to prevent it from happening in the future," he said.

"We recommend the formation of a senior blue ribbon commission to examine this in an independent, nonpartisan way and make recommendations for how to insulate intelligence assessors from political pressures," Cirincione said.

"We don't know what happened in the offices of the administration, but there's a lot of evidence that points to" intelligence assessors being pressured by their bosses.

[Faithless]

The United States used the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as a justification for launching the war against the regime of Saddam Hussein, according to the report.
And in the end it was all just BS.

Nice one is right.

[pfc beansprout]

:rolleyes:

wow....i bet the majority of americans are payin attn here too....they/we sure got duped....

[Emperor_Mike]

Possible ramifications of this finding on the current Administration's foreign and domestic policies?

[Martino]

Possible ramifications of this finding on the current Administration's foreign and domestic policies?

None. America's position seems to be that its intelligence community can repeatedly cry wolf, and not be held accountable. Again, a good example is the US refusing to allow specific flights to the US from Europe, on the grounds that it has received unspecified information of a threat. Flights have been held on the tarmac for up to 2-3 days whilst the passengers were vigourously investigated. No threat was uncovered, and no arrests made.

It has just been announced that nine Britons held for 2 years at Guantanamo Bay are about to be released without charge. A complete travesty of justice for which no US intelligence agency will ever be held accountable.

[SunWuKong]

might makes right

[krome]

WMDs have been under our noses all along. A short list:

1) Bible (social timebomb)
2) Koran (social timebomb)
3) US media
4) SUVs

[kitty]

WMDs have been under our noses all along. A short list:

1) Bible (social timebomb)
2) Koran (social timebomb)
3) US media
4) SUVs

okay, i'll bite. how are the bible and the koran social timebombs?

[krome]

^ Read thru the thread here. (http://www.hapas.com/forum/default.asp?fid=1&action=view&topic=4148&curpage=4) Also, see perpetual Mid-East conflict. I didn't finish the debate with DaViD & Lum cuz obviously we were all just stubbornly butting heads and were getting nowhere. Religious debates tire me unless I hear some really new enlightening information or rational logic. I personally wasn't seeing those, but that's just my opinion.

[Martino]

WMDs have been under our noses all along. A short list:

1) Bible (social timebomb)
2) Koran (social timebomb)
3) US media
4) SUVs

Oh, that's a nice simplified view of the world, but - you know, you could make the list more comprehensive. If you include other "social timebombs" like the invention of the wheel, taming of fire, the thoughts of Socrates, the development of the combustion engine and the concept of fast food, you'll have yourself a Unified Theory of Everything That's Wrong with the World.


;O)

[kitty]

i dunno... we're talking about religious texts that are open to interpretation. only the most stringent take everything literally... most believers in the Bible and other religious texts are tending towards taking everything more metaphorically. (our society is tending to mock those who take passages of the Bible literally, e.g. gay marriage, etc...)

are you arguing that, in actuality, all religions are 'social timebombs'? Are there any that you think are okay?

[krome]

^ ^Well, I said it was only a short list. And humancentric.

If you want to get really broad, HUMANS are a WMD. Our presence on this planet is basically one of destruction to the environment and other species. So, all our inventions would be subsets of us and tools for our destructive impact. True.

i dunno... we're talking about religious texts that are open to interpretation. only the most stringent take everything literally... most believers in the Bible and other religious texts are tending towards taking everything more metaphorically. (our society is tending to mock those who take passages of the Bible literally, e.g. gay marriage, etc...)

are you arguing that, in actuality, all religions are 'social timebombs'? Are there any that you think are okay?
*Note: It's Friday and I'm fried...so, this will be a quicky*

Well, these texts say what they say. Often, quite clearly and boldly. Like in that thread. So, if people choose to interpret them differently, maybe they're not true followers?

Well, I would argue that certain religions in particular that play racist favorites, instruct violence against "non-believers" or make self-fulfilling policies concerning the geo-political destiny of this world certainly qualify as social timebombs. Those are not truly very spiritual to me. And yes, that includes Christianity and Islam, in particular. Again, see Mid-East. No offense to anyone, just my opinion.

[kitty]

^ ^Well, I said it was only a short list. And humancentric.

If you want to get really broad, HUMANS are a WMD. Our presence on this planet is basically one of destruction to the environment and other species. So, all our inventions would be subsets of us and tools for our destructive impact. True.

well, i agree with that statement. but i am curious about your outlook on religion. which do you deem acceptable because on eof the peopl eon that thread brings up the good point that some asian religions have similar passages in their texts.

[Martino]

^ ^Well, I said it was only a short list. And humancentric.

If you want to get really broad, HUMANS are a WMD. Our presence on this planet is basically one of destruction to the environment and other species. So, all our inventions would be subsets of us and tools for our destructive impact. True.

Then if you really believe it to be simply the case that humans are a WMD, then blaming two religions for the cultural and political problems of a region is at best an unhelpful smokescreen, and at worst a piece of social demonising for the purposes of some other (hidden) agenda.

[krome]

some asian religions have similar passages in their texts.
I'm not familiar with Hinduism, but can you tell me of such similar violently intolerant passages in Taoism or Buddhism? In Buddhism, I believe the monks even shaved their heads to MINIMIZE racial & gender differences. To me, that is unifying, not divisive. Also, I know of no Buddhist or Taoist wars, ever (not that violence is necessarily inherently wrong, always).

[krome]

Then if you really believe it to be simply the case that humans are a WMD, then blaming two religions for the cultural and political problems of a region is at best an unhelpful smokescreen, and at worst a piece of social demonising for the purposes of some other (hidden) agenda.
Life is not black and white. Such religious strife exacerbates violence between humans and wartime destruction upon the planet. Sure, humans are still a strain on the planet regardless, but would be far less so without such beefin. My "hidden agenda" - is the truth. Capish? :rolleyes: What's yours?

PS - If they all aimin' for Heaven, who cares about "the Holy Land" on Earth? And why hate on and kill non-believers? Wouldn't their own punishment already be an eternity in H*ll? Then, that's just double-jeopardy to persecute them on top of that. :rolleyes:

[DragonKnight]

WMDs have been under our noses all along. A short list:

1) Bible (social timebomb)
2) Koran (social timebomb)
3) US media
4) SUVs
Hahaha, SUVs I must agree on.

But from the looks of the original post of this thread the WMD's talked about here are NOT on that list. I personally think you should start a seperate thread on the matter. :wink:

[Martino]

Life is not black and white.

You're the one drawing up lists.

[Faithless]

Another update:

Senate WMD Probe Expands (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/02/iraq/main603501.shtml)
(CBS/AP) The Senate Intelligence Committee has agreed to expand its review of intelligence on Iraq to examine whether the Bush administration accurately described the information it had on Saddam Hussein's weapons.

The committee will examine "whether public statements and reports and testimony regarding Iraq by U.S. government officials (between the 1991 Gulf War and the Iraq War) were substantiated by intelligence information," committee leaders said in a statement Thursday night.

The panel is nearing completion of a report expected to be extremely critical of the intelligence agencies' collection and analysis of prewar intelligence. Since the inquiry began in June, Democrats have insisted that the commission also examine whether the administration distorted intelligence to help build the case for war.

Republicans have refused and both sides have accused the other of using the traditionally bipartisan committee for political purposes.

The expansion of the inquiry is not expected to delay the release of the committee's report. It is not clear how long it will take to review the administration statements or whether a public report would be released before the November election.

Pressure for the expanded inquiry grew after the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, David Kay, said last month that intelligence agencies had wrongly concluded Iraq had large chemical and biological weapon stockpiles and an advanced nuclear weapons program. That intelligence served as President Bush's main argument for war.

Mr. Bush last week appointed a bipartisan commission to examine intelligence agencies' work on Iraq and other U.S. adversaries. The commission is led by Laurence Silberman, a former judge and ambassador to Yugoslavia, and Charles Robb, a former two-term Democratic senator and Virginia governor.

In addition to examining public statements, the Senate committee will also review intelligence activities involving the office of Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, and intelligence provided by the Iraqi National Congress, the leading exile group.

Democrats have charged that the Office of Special Plans under Feith functioned as a renegade intelligence agency, feeding policy-makers uncorroborated intelligence from the exile group. The Pentagon has said the office was a small operation set up to review intelligence produced by other agencies.

Committee Chairman Pat Roberts of Kansas called the expanded inquiry "a refinement and to a great extent a restatement of the committees ongoing review of prewar intelligence."

The panel's top Democrat, Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, said outstanding issues remain, "but we've made a lot of progress, and its clear that were moving in the right direction."

Last week, CIA director George Tenet said his agency's analysts " never said there was an imminent threat."

But there were differences between how classified CIA reports and public presentations described Iraq's capabilities.

For example, the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, drafted in October 2002, reveal doubts by some intelligence agencies about the extent of its nuclear program, the purpose of work its on unmanned aircraft, its doctrine for using WMD and the circumstances under which Saddam Hussein might partner with al Qaeda.

Administration officials rarely, if ever, hinted at those doubts.

And when Mr. Bush and aides in January 2003 mentioned an allegation that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa, it flew in the face of repeated efforts by the agency to keep the charge — which was not substantiated — out of the case for war.

In related developments:

Mr. Bush named the final two members of the commission that will investigate prewar intelligence on Iraq: Charles Vest, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and former Pentagon official Henry Rowen. The panel has until March 2005 to issue its report — well after the November presidential election.

Former U.S. weapons inspector Kay is advising Mr. Bush to acknowledge he was wrong about hidden storehouses of weapons in Iraq and move ahead with overhauling the intelligence process. Despite the lack of weapons of mass destruction, Kay said, Iraq had an aggressive program to develop missiles assisted by foreign technology and scientists.

Britain's inquiry examining the quality of prewar intelligence on Iraqi weapons will meet in private, its members have announced.

[DavidJoo]

None. America's position seems to be that its intelligence community can repeatedly cry wolf, and not be held accountable. Again, a good example is the US refusing to allow specific flights to the US from Europe, on the grounds that it has received unspecified information of a threat. Flights have been held on the tarmac for up to 2-3 days whilst the passengers were vigourously investigated. No threat was uncovered, and no arrests made.

It has just been announced that nine Britons held for 2 years at Guantanamo Bay are about to be released without charge. A complete travesty of justice for which no US intelligence agency will ever be held accountable.

There is a bit of a double standard in this post.

We have captured dozens of Al Qaeda and persons connected with terrorists. We of course have also killed a lot of Al Qaeda and captured a lot of intelligence, either human intelligence or hard intelligence. Incidents are even being declassified now, where in the past 2 years, we have CAUGHT people in the Middle East in the ACT of planning a terrorist attack. There was also a an oil tanker sunk, sailing from Mogadishu Somalia (Bin Laden's old playing ground) that was carrying enough plutonium to make a dirty bomb.

So the CIA gets all this information, and sometimes the hard evidence is so specific that it lists specific targets for assasination or a terrorist bombing. You know all the "Orange/Red/Yellow" Alerts that vary depending on what city you live in? If your city was recently put on alert (see Seattle, Washington DC, etc.) then that's because the CIA actually got information that a terrorist bombing was being planned for that site.

So the CIA has two options. Act on the information, or just ignore it. Sometimes its hard to act because there are so many captured documents, and "call ins" and "threats" that you nevr know which is a false alarm and which is for real. Hence, you get airlines being shut down, flights cancelled.

But what happens if you ignore some of the data you recieve? It looks like the FBI and CIA chose to ignore the warnings they recieved prior to 9/11, categorizing such reports as just another false alarm.

So it's a Catch-22 for our poor old boys in the Intelligence world. They don't have the funding or support to track everything, but they do what they can. It's a tough job.

And as far as those 9 Englishmen that we just released from Gitmo...they were suspected terrorists. Being of a certain nationality means nothing, especially if you happen to be Timothy McVeigh or John Walker Lindh.

[Faithless]

Has Colin Powell Contradicted Himself Again? (http://www.useless-knowledge.com/1234/mar/article432.html)

By Thomas Keyes * Mar. 31, 2005

According to a Reuters report posted on MSNBC News on March 30, 2005, former US Secretary of State Colin Powell, speaking recently with an unnamed German magazine, still maintains his claim that he was misinformed on the subject of Iraq's mythical WMD.

Powell said, “We were sometimes too loud, too direct, perhaps we made too much noise. That certainly shocked the Europeans sometimes...Yes, the insurgency is much bigger than we anticipated. But I’m glad that Saddam is in jail.”

Powell went on to say that he was "furious and angry" upon finding out that he had been misinformed about the WMD when he addressed the UN Security Council in February, 2003. He added, “It was information from our security services and from some Europeans, including Germans. Some of this information was wrong. I did not know this at the time. Hundreds of millions followed it on television. I will always be the one who presented it. I have to live with that.”

One might almost suppose that Powell was being magnanimous in admitting that he had overdone it, despite the fact that, instead of accepting sole responsibility himself, he seemed to be telling the Germans they were to blame too, which didn't appear to be the case at the time, as far as I can recall. And one might be led to admire Powell's tenacity for continuing nevertheless to believe in the war in spite of his confessed overstatements.

But there's an entirely different version of the history of Colin Powell's stance on the WMD. An article appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on September 23, 2003, with the headline, "Pilger claims White House knew Saddam was no threat."

According to the article, a report had been aired on British television the night before in which John Pilger, an Australian investigative reporter, said US Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice confirmed in early 2001 that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had been disarmed and was no threat.

Pilger claimed to have in his possession video footage of Colin Powell in Cairo, Egypt on February 24, 2001, two years before the US invasion of Iraq, saying in regards to Saddam Hussein, "He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors."

Two months later, according to Pilger, Condoleezza Rice, in unison with Colin Powell, said of Saddam, "We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt." The article did not say whether Pilger had video footage, a recording or a memorandum of Rice as she made her comments.

I recall reading the article about Pilger the day it appeared. It seemed highly unlikely that he could have invented the story, if he had video footage. as he claimed. If he did not have video footage, or if his video footage had been a forgery, nothing could have been easier than to prove him a falsifier.

In the following weeks however, I saw numerous references to Pilger's footage on a wide variety of obscure websites, but his comments never seemed to make it to any major newspapers, except the Sydney Morning Herald. I kept checking ProQuest's newspaper database and Altavista's News search. The procedure agreed upon by the major media seemed to be not to contradict or refute Pilger's claims, or even to vilify Pilger, but rather just to ignore him entirely. And apparently it worked.

This was a disappointment to me, as I was hoping that iron-clad evidence would appear, giving the lie to the whole WMD hoax. As I know from my own personal experiences in court rooms, iron-clad evidence means nothing if no one will look at it. But it seems to me that Colin Powell has been lying.

Another observation I'd like to make is that, with estimates of the cost of the Iraqi war varying from $150 billion to $200 billion and more, Saddam's incarceration, as pleasing as it was to Powell, was pretty expensive. For that amount of money, good housing for all of Iraq's 25,000,000 people might have been built. Even Hussein could have been mollified with that kind of humanitarianism. But I guess butchery is more gleeful to some people.

[Martino]

There is a bit of a double standard in this post.

You say there is a double standard in my post, then ramble on without saying what it is.


So it's a Catch-22 for our poor old boys in the Intelligence world. They don't have the funding or support to track everything, but they do what they can. It's a tough job.

What is the Federal budget for the American intelligence services?

So you don't think if public servants makes a gargantuan blunder that costs tens of thousands of lives, and tens of billions of US tax dollars, they shouldn't be accountable?

Would you think that if you yourself was false accused? I think not.

And as far as those 9 Englishmen that we just released from Gitmo...they were suspected terrorists.

They were prisoners of a rogue state that ignores international law. Scary. The 'evidence' that robbed them of two years of freedom turned out to be non-existent.

[nola]

How much do wrongfully imprisoned people get after they are free in the US or England? It should be alot as in more than just work compensation for that year.