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Shelving Inconvenient Evidence

Shelving Inconvenient Evidence

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The Washington Post has reported on another W deceit. Like the Wilson situation, it centers on intelligence the administration didn’t want to hear as it was preparing for war. Like the Wilson situation, it bears the mark of Cheney more than it does of Bush.

“A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq — not made public until now — had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons.” The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped “secret” and shelved.

“There was no connection to anything biological,” said one expert who studied the trailers. Another recalled an epithet that came to be associated with the trailers: “the biggest sand toilets in the world“.

When President Bush declared in 2003 that “We have found the weapons of mass destruction”—referring to two mobile “biological laboratories.” He said this despite the fact that the “evidence” had already been discredited. In fact, the leaders of a Pentagon-sponsored team had determined two days beforehand that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons, a finding they sent to Washington, where it was classified top secret. Meanwhile, for almost a year afterwards, the Bush administration continued to point to the trailers as vindication of its push to invade Iraq.

News of the team’s early impressions leaped across the Atlantic well ahead of the technical report. Over the next two days, a stream of anxious e-mails and phone calls from Washington pressed for details and clarifications.

The reason for the nervousness was soon obvious: In Washington, a CIA analyst had written a draft white paper on the trailers, an official assessment that would also reflect the views of the CIA. The white paper described the trailers as “the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program.” It also explicitly rejected an explanation by Iraqi officials, described in a New York Times article a few days earlier, that the trailers might be mobile units for producing hydrogen.

But the technical team’s preliminary report, written in a tent in Baghdad and approved by each team member, reached a conclusion opposite from that of the white paper.

Team members and other sources intimately familiar with the mission declined to discuss technical details of the team’s findings because the report remains classified. But they cited the Iraqi Survey Group’s nonclassified, final report to Congress in September 2004 as reflecting the same conclusions.

That report said the trailers were “impractical for biological agent production,” lacking 11 components that would be crucial for making bioweapons. Instead, the trailers were “almost certainly designed and built for the generation of hydrogen,” the survey group reported.

The group’s report and members of the technical team also dismissed the notion that the trailers could be easily modified to produce weapons.

The trailers may have been used to produce hydrogen, possibly for weather/surveillance balloons. They still bore the identification plates of the British company that manufactured the units and sold them to Iraq.

Related quotations from Think Progress:

BUSH: We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. [Bush on Polish TV, 5/29/03]

POWELL: We have already discovered mobile biological factories of the kind that I described to the Security Council on the 5th of February. We have now found them. There is no question in our mind that that’s what their purpose was. Nobody has come up with an alternate purpose that makes sense. [Powell, 6/2/03]

WOLFOWITZ: We — as the whole world knows — have in fact found some significant evidence to confirm exactly what Secretary Powell said when he spoke to the United Nations about the development of mobile biological weapons production facilities that would seem to confirm fairly precisely the information we received from several defectors, one in particular who described the program in some detail. [Wolfowitz, 6/3/03]

RICE: But let’s remember what we’ve already found. Secretary Powell on February 5th talked about a mobile, biological weapons capability. That has now been found and this is a weapons laboratory trailers capable of making a lot of agent that–dry agent, dry biological agent that can kill a lot of people. So we are finding these pieces that were described. … This was a program that was built for deceit and concealment. [CNBC, 6/3/03]

JOHN BOLTON: And I think the presentation that Secretary Powell made to the Security Council some months ago, which he worked on day and night for four or five days before going up to New York, is actually standing up very well to the test of reality as we learn more about what was going on inside Iraq. He explained to the Security Council and, indeed, showed diagrams of mobile biological weapons production facilities. We have already found two such laboratories. [Testimony before House International Relations Committee, 6/4/03]

BUSH: We recently found two mobile biological weapons facilities which were capable of producing biological agents. [Bush, 6/5/03]

POWELL: And I would put before you exhibit A, the mobile biological labs that we have found. Now, people are saying, well, are they truly mobile biological labs? Yes, they are. [Fox News Sunday, 6/8/03]

POWELL: I believe that they did have them and still have them, and I am confident that as we continue our efforts we will find these weapons, as well as the programs that supported these weapons. The mobile biological laboratories that were found and presented to the world, I think, is a further evidence of this. [Powell on al-Arabiyya, 6/23/03]

POWELL: [The State Department’s intelligence analysts’] confidence level is increasing. … And so we have been in complete open analysis with, you know, having a complete open analysis with the CIA, and the Director of Central Intelligence remains confident of his judgment. And frankly, I haven’t seen anything to suggest that that judgment is wrong. [Powell, 6/26/03]

POWELL: I reviewed that presentation that I made on the 5th of February a number of times, as you might imagine, over recent weeks, and it holds up very well. It was the solid, coordinated judgment of the intelligence community. Some of the things that I talked about that day we have now seen in reality. We have found the mobile biological weapons labs that I could only show cartoons of that day. We now have them. [NBC Today Show, 6/30/03]

CHENEY: We had intelligence reporting before the war that there were at least seven of these mobile labs that he had gone out and acquired. We’ve, since the war, found two of them. They’re in our possession today, mobile biological facilities that can be used to produce anthrax or smallpox or whatever else you wanted to use during the course of developing the capacity for an attack. [Meet the Press, 9/14/03]

POWELL: And even though there are differences within the overall intelligence community, the Director of Central Intelligence, examining all of the material with respect to that van and examining counter-arguments as to what it might be, stands behind the judgment that what we found was positive evidence of a mobile biological weapons lab, and it has not been discounted sufficiently. [ABC This Week, 9/28/03]

Criminal Source and Accountability

Criminal Source and Accountability

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Cozy with the Bush administration, Judith Miller may go to jail to protect their leakers (Rove and whoever is intended eventually to take the fall for his action – wherever will they find another Ollie North?). Normally I would be on the side of journalists to protect their anonymous sources, but in this case it is obstruction of justice to do so. I don’t think journalists should be accomplices to all this, and I don’t believe that’s what investigative journalism is all about. Of course, I don’t see a whole lot of investigative journalism anymore. There seems to be more of the “verbatim recitation of press release” style – not much in the way of helping the public to make even the most basic distinctions. Throw a few images together and you can make anything look like anything – like the falling statue of Hussein – let’s see a pan-out of the whole square, the context.

Ironically, Judith Miller says she is going to jail to defend “a free press” – could it be more absurd? What a strange Orwellian precedent! Watch for it to be used in future.

So anyway, “Bioterrorism Judy” has to decide which is worse – go to jail or risk the wrath of her sponsors/sources/demons/whatever they are. She was instrumental in spreading the word that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. I actually read her book while I was writing my dissertation, so I think I understand how she could have been pulled in…

Meanwhile her colleague somehow walks. Very strange.

I wonder what “reporter’s notes” were actually turned over and how the corporation would even have those notes to begin with?

Outing the classified information of Plame as a CIA agent is in fact an act of treason under the law. Her work, and the work of others was hopelessly compromised and their lives were endangered (and perhaps even lost, how would we know?) because of this spiteful act. We could have used them to get better intelligence, to better protect the USA. That this was done in a sneaky way, and simply to punish her husband’s truth-telling to power (he was right about there being no WMDs, remember?) simply underlines the unethical quality of this administration. Hypocrites – whispering to the press to manipulate us, while publically condemning leaks. Please.

Meanwhile, there is simply no accountability of the governing to the governed. No-one from on higher up has even been held responsible for the war crimes in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo – and if Alberto G. comes up for nomination, just remember who crafted the new policies for torture. Can you still call this a democracy or even, as my few remaining conservative friends remind me, a “representative republic”? Wake up sheeple!

We still have mechanisms in this contry to change things. Don’t let it get to the point of revolution. Before the 2006 election, we need to take control of our electoral apparatus. Review the new information at http://www.blackboxvoting.org about the voting machine as a “a house with an unlockable revolving door.”

Terrorism and the Preemptive Strike

Terrorism and the Preemptive Strike

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Since the advance news of Bush’s first campaign commercial came out, I have been thinking of all the ways to respond to the statement that “some people are attacking the president for attacking the terrorists.” While I will undoubtedly have more to say if and when I actually see it, I do have a few comments in advance.

I haven’t heard anyone attacking anybody for attacking the terrorists, just as I don’t know anyone who does not support the troops (we all love those brave men and women, but some of us want to see them come home, or have sufficient income for their families, or not sacrifice their lives for no good reason, or perhaps even avoid being guinea pigs). There is, however, a wee bit of disagreement about who the “terrorists” actually are, or how best to attack them.

Are the terrorists those being held without charges in Cuba? Are the terrorists american citizens who need to be monitored a la Orwell? Are all foreign brown people terrorists? In some sense, could we be the terrorists? Like a virus, the “enemy” is everywhere, from caves to suburban American communities. The state of permanent emergency both reinforces and consolidates the power of a sub-faction of the republican party (the neo-cons) into an ever-evolving fascistic force, and dupes the American people into supporting them out of a sense of patriotism.

How best to “attack” the terrorists? Is anyone against international cooperation on the issue? When we have an immanent threat, or decent intelligence, there isn’t much squawking about it. No-one seemed to object to freezing assets, for example, or to targeting sites for a strike.

Speaking of attacks and strikes, let’s think on the term “preeemptive strike.” The term preemptive strike is being used in a very odd way by this administration. Traditionally, it is defined as an advance strike in the face of a justifiable sense of immanent danger – a clear and present danger. It conveys the sense of a quick strategic attack on a specific target (like a biological weapons factory or a nuclear missile launching site) in order to destroy any possibility that the enemy will meet its destructive objective.

The specific military strategic definition has also been expanded by the history of atomic weapons, and draws its power from the fear generated by nuclear proliferation and the hopes behind theories of deterrence. Fear of a first strike in such a context of possible apocalyptic consequence contributes to our national feeling that we can and should dictate who can and cannot possess nuclear weapons. More recently, of course, the nuclear fears have been extended to include all weapons of mass destruction, all of which we have ourselves (and that reminds me, I really have to write a piece on weapons of mass destruction).

In the case of Iraq, the “preemptive strike” does not meet the definition in any sense, although it draws considerable psychological power from it. We never found specific targets in Iraq, but instead used the language to justify complete invasion and takeover, in a quasi-corporate imperialistic and imperious manner driven less by humanitarian concern for the Iraqi citizens than political and economic concerns. It assumes that we have the power to take precedence. It gives contracts to its buddies, and avoids confronting the real issues. There is sufficient reason to believe that the administration simply wanted a war in Iraq despite (rather than because of) any intelligence they might muster. In this era of ambiguous “states” of war, it should be clear that the war in Iraq is a long way from being “over,” regardless of any statement to the contrary. In any case, taking over a nation does not solve the problem of terrorism. Additionally, we have now set a precedent that will be hard to break, not only with regard to our own country, but also with regard to any other country who could use the same argument.

How about a national discussion about the terrorists that the president supports? Sharon, for example? While Israel seems somewhat divided (in much the same way as our own country), there seems to be a general lack of accountability that is fair to blame on the nation, just as our own actions can be blamed on all of us. I never thought that I would become anti-Israel, but the nation of Israel has become its own shadow. Are they going to set up the ovens next? And isn’t this the primary reason that the terrorists are against us in the first place? We have a strange blindness with regard to this. There is certainly enough blame to go around in the middle east, but let’s use our weight to try to solve that problem. Just when it seemed that Bush was going to be a major player in doing so, he stepped back off the scene.

But I will say something good about President Bush. He spent Thanksgiving in Iraq and addressed some of the troops. I could be – and actually am – very cynical about that, but I’m brushing my criticism aside for the moment since that would erode my overriding judgment on the matter. Whatever his motivations, and I think there are many, it was still the right thing to do. It was uncommonly courageous on his part. As a psychological preemptive strike, it was a good one.