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Bu-lat-lat (boo-lat-lat) verb: to search, probe, investigate, inquire; to unearth facts Volume 3, Number 17 June 1 - 7, 2003 Quezon City, Philippines |
Unease
Grows in Washington Over Fruitless Weapons Search By
Jim Lobe Back
to Alternative Reader Index
WASHINGTON,
May 27 (IPS) - The failure of the U.S. military to find any strong evidence of
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD), let alone links between former
President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, is creating growing unease within both
Congress and the administration of President George W. Bush. The
administration sold the war it launched in March with allies the United Kingdom
and Australia based on its contention that Baghdad had massive quantities of WMD,
some of which could have been transferred to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda or
similar groups to carry out an attack against the United States or its allies. But
after seven weeks of uncontested control of Iraq's territory, it has yet to find
even one gram of biological, chemical or nuclear material designed for weapons
use, despite an intensive search by specially trained teams that have
investigated all of the sites identified by the intelligence community before
the war as most likely to hold WMD. "The
Bush team's extensive hype of WMD in Iraq as justification for a pre-emptive
invasion has become more than embarrassing," said Democratic Senator Robert
Byrd, the longest-serving lawmaker in Congress, who has emerged as its most
scathing critic of the war. "It
has raised serious questions about prevarication and the reckless use of power.
Were our troops needlessly put at risk? Were countless Iraq civilians killed and
maimed when war was not really necessary? Was the American public deliberately
misled? Was the world?" he asked in a blistering address on the Senate
floor last week. It
is not only Democrats who are raising such questions. "Obviously, it
concerns us that we have what I think are credible reports that weapons exist
that cannot be accounted for," said the chairman of the House of
Representatives Intelligence Committee, Representative Porter Goss of Florida. Goss
and his Senate counterpart, Pat Roberts, are already planning hearings to assess
information acquired by the intelligence community and used by the
administration to rally public opinion behind the war. The
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has also launched a review, reportedly at the
behest of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, whose own pressure on the intelligence
community to unearth evidence of WMD and links between Baghdad and al-Qaeda
ironically has been blamed by retired intelligence officers for distorting the
process that led to the U.S.-led attack. Rumsfeld
last year created an Office of Special Plans (OSP) under the direction of Deputy
Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary William Luti precisely
because they were unhappy that the evidence compiled by the CIA and other
intelligence agencies, particularly about alleged ties between Baghdad and al-Qaeda,
was extremely weak. As
explained by W. Patrick Lang, former director of Middle East analysis at the
Defense Intelligence Agency, to the 'New York Times', the OSP "started
picking out things that supported their thesis and stringing them into arguments
that they could use with the president". "It's
not intel," he said, using an insider's word for intelligence, "it's
political propaganda". The
Pentagon naturally strongly denies this, and even the CIA, some of whose
analysts were reportedly furious about what they saw as manipulation of
intelligence by the Pentagon, insists that, while the al-Qaeda evidence was
always considered shaky, its own evidence that Baghdad did retain significant
quantities of WMD in violation of United Nations resolutions was strong. Both
agencies have offered explanations for why no WMD have been uncovered. Pentagon
Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith recently told Congress that only about
20 percent of roughly 600 suspected sites have been investigated, although he
conceded that most of those considered most likely to hold WMD have been
examined. "I
am confident that we will eventually be able to piece together a fairly complete
account of Iraq's WMD programmes, but the process will take months and perhaps
years," he testified 12 days ago. "We're learning about new sites
every day." Other
Pentagon officials have suggested that perhaps Saddam Hussein did destroy all
his WMD just before the war, or that he had a "just-in-time" weapons
system that kept key chemicals separated in civilian neighbourhoods or other
unlikely areas until the moment they would be combined and used, or that the
weapons remain hidden in remote mountain areas deep in the ground where they are
unlikely ever to be discovered, or that all the suspect sites were looted before
U.S. troops could secure them, as happened with a major nuclear site. Some
have even suggested that Baghdad may have destroyed all the weapons in the early
1990s, but then acted as if it still had them in order to deter an attack.
Kenneth Adelman, a member of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board and a major war
booster, said he thought that Hussein might have launched a "massive
disinformation campaign" to that end. The
strongest evidence collected to date, aside from special chemical warfare gear
that could have been left over from the Iran-Iraq war, is the discovery two
weeks ago of two mobile trailers of the kind that Secretary of State Colin
Powell described to the U.N. Security Council before the war as mobile units
used to create biological weapons on site. While
Pentagon officials have insisted that no other purpose for the vans could be
explained, they have still failed to find any specific biological or chemical
evidence, such as residues in the equipment, which proves they were used for
that purpose. The trailers remain under investigation. Even
before their discovery, however, the chief task force created by the Pentagon to
find the weapons--consisting of biologists, chemists, arms-treaty experts,
nuclear operators, translators and computer experts--was told to wind down its
operations and prepare to return home. Meanwhile,
the administration, in addition to reducing expectations over WMD, has tried to
focus public attention instead on the discovery and exhumation of mass graves of
alleged victims of Hussein's rule, in part to provide an alternative
justification for going to war. Some
analysts have argued that the administration relied far too heavily on
defectors, particularly those supplied by the Iraqi National Congress (INC) led
by Ahmed Chalabi who has made little secret of his ambitions since 1992--when he
created the group--to replace Hussein in Baghdad. Indeed,
the highest-ranking Iraqi official ever to defect from Iraq and Hussein's own
son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, told U.S., British and U.N. interrogators in 1995
that Iraq had destroyed all its WMD after the first Gulf War, and also warned
them against Kidhir Hamza, a nuclear scientist who defected in 1994, as "a
professional liar". Like
other defectors used by the INC, Hamza played a key role in persuading
Washington that Hussein was revving up his nuclear programme, for which no
evidence has been found. Hamza is now in Baghdad working with the U.S.
occupation. "This could conceivably be the greatest intelligence hoax of all time," noted Representative Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee last week. "I doubt it, but we have to ask." May 27, 2003 Bulatlat.com We want to know what you think of this article.
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