Where are the WMD? (long)

“Well, they buried them in the sand. That's why they were such an imminent threat to the United States. All those many tons and tons of nerve gas leaching into earth's crust, through the molten core, only to surface in the United States. We barely got to them in time.”

“The hell with the WMD - I wanna see the MMV (Mammaries of Mass Volume)!!”

“Shoulda sent Hef instead of David Kay....”

“Oops No WMD in Iraq, source claims
or try this one: Draft Report Said to Cite No Success in Iraq Arms Hunt
Not sure that second link will work.”

“what are you people talking about WMD?This war was about liberating the people of Iraq-at least according to our Prez.Different month,different reason.I hope the international community doesnt trust us cuz i sure dont think we can lead in a positive manner with this kind of 'leadership'.”

“Besides that we went in based on the EXACT same intell that Clinton used when he started slinging Tomahawks in '98 (and of course not finishing the job) brought forth by his admin and the UN.”

“Kuwait foils smuggling of chemicals, bio warheads from Iraq

Hindustan Times? Well, at any rate, they're attributing it to AP”

“Wow, the unnamed "European" country is called France.”

“I'll be interested to see how this story develops.”

“No US organizations are covering it yet, that I can find.”

“Have you found a US organization that is covering it up?”

“U.S. officials are reportedly looking into the possibility Saddam Hussein was bluffing as they probe the former Iraqi dictator's alleged weapons of mass destruction program. With no major chemical or biological weapons yet found in Iraq, The Washington Post reports the American in charge of the search is pursuing the possibility that Saddam was pretending he had handed them out to his top commanders to deter the U.S. from invading.


http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/02/24/iraq/main541815.shtml

Wouldn't take much to outwit out nitwit in the White House.”

“Well, this one looks doubtful. I would think someone would have picked it up by now.”

“hmmmmmm... Velly intellesting.

Google sez the story was posted 8 hours ago. Where did you first hear about it?”

“uhhh...cough cough_drudgecough.”

“Which is why I cautioned the 48 hour rule.”

“tick-tock, tick-tock...”

“Roger.”

“WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION FOUND IN IRAQ

















oh wait... no.”

“The New York Times
April 25, 2003
Bush Says Arms Will Be Found, With Iraqi Aid
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON and DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, April 24 — President Bush said today that Iraqi officials
and scientists had provided the United States with information that
Saddam Hussein may have destroyed or dispersed chemical and biological
weapons before the war, suggesting that the search for proof of an Iraqi
weapons program could be a long one. Responding to speculation about Mr.
Hussein's fate, the president said that there was considerable evidence
that he was dead or severely wounded but that the United States did not
have definitive proof, like DNA, that the Iraqi leader had been killed.
Mr. Bush also said the resistance faced by American troops in southern
Iraq in the conflict's first weeks was fiercer than he had expected, an
admission that seemed at odds with the Pentagon's insistence at the time
that the war was unfolding according to plan. "Shock and awe said to
many people that all we've got to do is unleash some might and people
will crumble," Mr. Bush said in an interview with NBC News, his most
extensive since the invasion of Iraq. "And it turns out the fighters
were a lot fiercer than we thought."

Mr. Bush gave a detailed account of how the war looked from his
perspective as commander in chief. He said he had some initial concerns
about the first blow of the war, his last-minute decision to bomb a home
in Baghdad where an agent had reported that Mr. Hussein and his sons
might be spending the night. "I was hesitant at first, to be frank with
you," Mr. Bush said, "because I was worried that the first pictures
coming out of Iraq would be a wounded grandchild of Saddam Hussein." But
in the end, Mr. Bush said, he was convinced that he had a good
opportunity to kill Mr. Hussein. The agent who provided the information
from the scene, he added, judged the bombing a success. "He felt like we
got Saddam," the president said, adding that the evidence about Mr.
Hussein's fate remained uncertain but that if he was not killed he was
severely wounded. Asked if it might take two years to bring stability to
Iraq, Mr. Bush replied: "It could, it could. Or less. Who knows?"

Mr. Bush did not elaborate on the evidence that the United States has
gathered since the war's end about Iraq's weapons programs. He
acknowledged that questions about the credibility of the United States
would not be put to rest until weapons were found. "I think there's
going to be skepticism until people find out there was, in fact, a
weapons of mass destruction program," he said. Despite that, he
expressed confidence that American forces would eventually find chemical
and biological weapons. "We are learning more as we interrogate or have
discussions with Iraqi scientists and people within the Iraqi structure,
that perhaps he destroyed some, perhaps he dispersed some," Mr. Bush
said. Mr. Bush said the United States had so far examined only 90 of the
hundreds of sites that Mr. Hussein and his government might have used to
hide the weapons. But the sites that have been examined are those
designated by the administration as most likely to conceal weapons. "And
so we will find them," Mr. Bush said in the interview, conducted today
by Tom Brokaw aboard Air Force One between the president's appearances
in Ohio. "But it's going to take time to find them. And the best way to
find them is to continue to collect information from the humans, Iraqis
who were involved in hiding them."

In an interview last week, a senior administration official who had
reviewed the same intelligence on the weapons program that Mr. Bush had
seen said it was unclear what kind of chemical and biological stores the
United States would find. "It's possible that they had the precursors,
the raw stuff, but they did not weaponize it," the official said. "We
just don't know yet." But the senior official said there was no real
concern in the administration that nothing of importance would be found.
"We couldn't have been that far off," the official said.

In describing the war from his perspective, Mr. Bush combined
acknowledgments of doubts and pressures with accounts of dramatic
moments and humor, including his fascination with the relentlessly
upbeat accounts of heroic Iraqi resistance provided by the information
minister, Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf. "He's my man; he was great," said a
laughing Mr. Bush. "Somebody accused us of hiring him and putting him
there. He was a classic." The meeting in the White House situation room
on March 19 at which he gave Gen. Tommy R. Franks the go-ahead to begin
the war was "an emotional moment," Mr. Bush said. "I then went outside
and walked around the grounds, just to get a little air and collect my
thoughts," he recounted. But the plan he had just settled on, calling
for Special Forces to begin operating in Iraq, was quickly overtaken by
new intelligence about Mr. Hussein's whereabouts. Mr. Bush recounted how
an agent who called in to Central Command from outside a residential
compound in Baghdad was able to provide firmer and firmer intelligence
throughout that afternoon. "There in the Oval Office, we were getting
near-instant feedback from eyes on the ground," Mr. Bush said. "It was
an amazing moment to think that a person risking his life, viewing the
farms, watching the entries, seeing, observing what was taking place
inside one of Saddam's most guarded facilities, was able to pick up a
device, call Centcom, and Centcom would call us." Asked whether the
agent was alive, the president said: "Yes he is. He is with us. Thank
God. A brave soul."

Mr. Bush had nothing nice to say about President Jacques Chirac of
France, who led the opposition to a United Nations resolution
authorizing the use of military force against Iraq. "I doubt he'll be
coming to the ranch anytime soon," Mr. Bush said, saying it appeared to
many in his administration "that the French position was anti-American."
He expressed fear that the disagreement would weaken the NATO alliance,
and in recent days some administration officials have been talking about
marginalizing France within NATO. "Hopefully," Mr. Bush said, "the past
tensions will subside, and the French won't be using their position
within Europe to create alliances against the United States, or Britain,
or Spain, or any of the new countries that are the new democracies in
Europe."

Mr. Bush made it clear that Turkey's refusal to allow American forces to
invade Iraq from the north had in his view made the war more difficult
and bloody. "Because, for example, we didn't come north from Turkey,
Saddam Hussein was able to move a lot of special Republican Guard units
and fighters from north to south," Mr. Bush said. The result was that
American forces faced "significant resistance," the president said.

For the first time, Mr. Bush acknowledged that he was concerned about
power vacuums in Iraq "being filled by Iranian agents." On Wednesday,
the White House said it had warned Iran not to interfere with American
efforts to build an "Islamic democracy" in Iraq. "We have sent the word
to the Iranians that's what we expect," he said, adding that he had
talked to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and Jose Maria Aznar of
Spain about that subject on Wednesday, to get them "to send the same
message." But he made no threats against Iran, and said "we have no
military plans" to deal with the country. He noted that he had sent a
similar message to Syria, where officials were responding.

Mr. Bush's overt use of diplomatic pressure against Syria and Iran, two
countries that Mr. Bush has identified as sponsors of terrorism, is in
stark contrast to the use of preemptive force against Iraq. Yet at one
point in his interview, Mr. Bush acknowledged that he had yet to fully
form the "Bush doctrine," or to think through how the American victory
in Iraq would affect his vow to deal with weapons of mass destruction on
a global basis. He also said that he would "work hard to achieve a
two-state solution" in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and that he now
had an opportunity to attempt that. "I think it will accelerate" he said
of the peace process, "and, hopefully, greatly." But he added, "I'm not
so sure what that exactly means."

Even when the fighting was toughest, a time when many commentators were
raising questions about the military strategy and predicting a long,
difficult war, Mr. Bush said his faith in the war plan never wavered. "I
had confidence in the plan, because I had confidence in my national
security team," Mr. Bush said. But he said there were low moments along
the way, including the day when five American soldiers were taken
prisoner of war. One of the high points, he said, was the rescue of Pfc.
Jessica D. Lynch. "Secretary Rumsfeld told me not to get my hopes up,
but there was going to be a very sensitive operation into a hospital
where he thought that there would be an American P.O.W.," Mr. Bush said.
"And then when we heard that she had been rescued, it was a joyous moment."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company”

“The problem is those darned Iraqis keep dispersing them as soon as we plant them.”

“Just thought it might be nice to have this thread at the top again.”

“What Kay Found

By Colin L. Powell
Tuesday, October 7, 2003

The interim findings of David Kay and the Iraq Survey Group make two things abundantly clear: Saddam Hussein's Iraq was in material breach of its United Nations obligations before the Security Council passed Resolution 1441 last November, and Iraq went further into breach after the resolution was passed.



Kay's interim findings offer detailed evidence of Hussein's efforts to defy the international community to the last. The report describes a host of activities related to weapons of mass destruction that "should have been declared to the U.N." It reaffirms that Iraq's forbidden programs spanned more than two decades, involving thousands of people and billions of dollars.

What the world knew last November about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs was enough to justify the threat of serious consequences under Resolution 1441. What we now know as a result of David Kay's efforts confirms that Hussein had every intention of continuing his work on banned weapons despite the U.N. inspectors, and that we and our coalition partners were right to eliminate the danger that his regime posed to the world.

Although Kay and his team have not yet discovered stocks of the weapons themselves, they will press on in the months ahead with their important and painstaking work. All indications are that they will uncover still more evidence of Hussein's dangerous designs.

Before the war, our intelligence had detected a calculated campaign to prevent any meaningful inspections. We knew that Iraqi officials, members of the ruling Baath Party and scientists had hidden prohibited items in their homes.

Lo and behold, Kay and his team found strains of organisms concealed in a scientist's home, and they report that one of the strains could be used to produce biological agents. Kay and his team also discovered documents and equipment in scientists' homes that would have been useful for resuming uranium enrichment efforts.

Kay and his team have "discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002. The discovery . . . has come about both through the admissions of Iraqi scientists and officials concerning information they deliberately withheld and through physical evidence of equipment and activities that the Iraq Survey Group has discovered that should have been declared to the U.N."

The Kay Report also addresses the issue of suspected mobile biological agent laboratories: "Investigation into the origin of and intended use for the two trailers found in northern Iraq in April has yielded a number of explanations, including hydrogen, missile propellant and BW [biological warfare] production, but technical limitations would prevent any of these processes from being ideally suited to these trailers. That said, nothing . . . rules out their potential use in BW production." Here Kay's findings are inconclusive. He is continuing to work this issue.

Kay and his team have, however, found this: "A clandestine network of laboratories and safe houses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service that contained equipment subject to U.N. monitoring and suitable for continuing CBW [chemical-biological weapons] research." They also discovered: "a prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of BW agents, that Iraqi officials working to prepare for U.N. inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the U.N."

The Kay Report confirms that our intelligence was correct to suspect the al-Kindi Co. of being involved in prohibited activity. Missile designers at al-Kindi told Kay and his team that Iraq had resumed work on converting SA-2 surface-to-air missiles into ballistic missiles with a range of about 250 kilometers, and that this work continued even while UNMOVIC inspectors were in Iraq. The U.N.-mandated limit for Iraq was a range of 150 kilometers.

The Kay Report also confirmed our prewar intelligence that indicated Iraq was developing missiles with ranges up to 1,000 kilometers. Similarly, Kay substantiated our reports that Iraq had tested an unmanned aerial vehicle to 500 kilometers, also in violation of U.N. resolutions.

What's more, he and his team found that elaborate efforts to shield illicit programs from inspection persisted even after the collapse of Hussein's regime. Key evidence was deliberately eliminated or dispersed during the postwar period. In a wide range of offices, laboratories and companies suspected of developing weapons of mass destruction, computer hard drives were destroyed, files were burned and equipment was carefully cleansed of all traces of use -- and done so in a pattern that was clearly deliberate and selective, rather than random.

One year ago, when President Bush brought his concerns about Iraq to the United Nations, he made it plain that his principal concern in a post-Sept. 11 world was not just that a rogue regime such as Saddam Hussein's had WMD programs, but that such horrific weapons could find their way out of Iraq into the arms of terrorists who would have even fewer compunctions about using them against innocent people across the globe.

In the interim report, Kay and his team record the chilling fact that they "found people, technical information and illicit procurement networks that if allowed to flow to other countries and regions could accelerate global proliferation."

Having put an end to that harrowing possibility alone justifies our coalition's action against Hussein's regime. But that is not the only achievement of our brave men and women in uniform and their coalition partners.

Three weeks ago I paid my respects at a mass grave in the northern city of Halabja, where on a Friday morning in March 1988, Hussein's forces murdered 5,000 men, women and children with chemical weapons. Saddam Hussein can cause no more Halabjas. His "Republic of Fear" no longer holds sway over the people of Iraq. For the first time in three decades, the Iraqi people have reason to hope for the future.

President Bush was right: This was an evil regime, lethal to its own people, in deepening material breach of its Security Council obligations, and a threat to international peace and security. Hussein would have stopped at nothing until something stopped him. It's a good thing that we did.

The writer is secretary of state.”

“Sorry. It didn't look that long on the web page, and I was too lazy to make a link.”

“I think it's 'abundantly clear' that Powell's pre-war presentation at the UN was chock full of wishful thinking.

Once again he makes an ample case --- for continuing a regime of thorough inspections.”

“That's my guess.

If they are in Iraq, they will be found, sooner or later.”

“Aren't Steamy Melon Balls considered weapons of mass destruction?”

“Maybe they're in the trunk of that lemon, ya freakin' goofball.”

“hussein was never a threat. bin laden deflated dubya's double #&%!$, and, well, he had to hit somebody, didnt he?”

“finishin dear daddy's business perhaps?”

“Maybe they're in the trunk of that lemon, ya freakin' goofball."
Steamy Melon Balls
05:45:02 PM
10/07/03

Lol I just about fell out of my chair!!”

“Ohio Hiker = freakin' goofball.


BTW, it's not really 'steam'; it's gaseous CO₂ bubbling up from the submerged dry ice.”

“I was just thinking about what happened to those punk dudes in "Repo Man" when they opened the trunk of that 1964 Chevy Malibu....”

“The single tube of botulinum found in an Iraqi scientist's home, which the British and U.S. governments cited as evidence of Iraqi intent to manufacture biological weapons, was hidden there ten years ago, Kay said Sunday.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/02/24/iraq/main541815.shtml”

“BTW, it's not really 'steam'; it's gaseous CO2 bubbling up from the submerged dry ice."
Steamy Melon Balls
05:52:09 PM
10/07/03

Your balls are submerged in dry ice? That's gotta hurt. j/k”

“It's good business to build and blow up bombs.That all.Oh, it's better when your daddy makes money doing it.And , the war mongers can go---- dup-de- dup de-duppy-dup-dup.”

“"We know where they are [MWD]. They are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad." (Donald Rumsfeld, March 30, 2003).


So weapons inspector David Kay has returned from Iraq, and the news is: no weapons of mass destruction. Oh sure, they uncovered one or two programs and discovered that the Iraqis might have wanted to have weapons at some point in the future, but, uh, no actual weapons. Reaction from the Bush administration was downright lethargic - surprising really, considering that they convinced the American people that we had to invade Iraq before Saddam dropped anthrax down our chimneys. But head chickenhawk Donald Rumsfeld, he of the "We know where they are. They are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad. North and south and east and west a bit. They're under Saddam's bed and in his socks. They're in the breakfast cereal of every Iraqi child. They're in the flowers and the trees. They're blowing in the wind, somewhere over the rainbow," seemed particularly unimpressed. Upon hearing the news of the Kay Report's conclusions, Rumsfeld said that it would be "unfortunate" if U.S. intelligence before the war was "dramatically wrong." Unfortunate? Unfortunate? Pardon me, but it's unfortunate when you're doing the dishes and you accidentally break a mug. It's unfortunate when someone backs into you in a parking lot. I think the situation in Iraq has gone a little past unfortunate, Donald. How about a downright bloody disaster? How about a mismanaged, ill-conceived fiasco? How about a murderous, useless, financially backbreaking #&%!$-up of epic proportions? Unfortunate indeed.”

“It's really not as bad as it sounds, Fango! A little vodka, a little melon liquer, some fresh orange juice... and a little dry ice, LOL


(we now return you to the regularly scheduled death & destruction of the WMD thread)”

“Now the standard has really shifted. WMD ---> WMD Programs ---> ambitions to possess WMDs.


"And let there be no mistake, right up to the end, Saddam Hussein continued to harbor ambitions to threaten the world with weapons of mass destruction"
- Condoleezza Rice”

“Ohhhhhhh Noooooooooo, it's Dr. Evil and his l'il pal Mini Me.”

“Invade the ambitious, I say.”

“I heard a little from Condo's speech last evening.

Along with all that crap about ambitions she said that he had "three billion $$$ in illegal income" with which to threaten "the world" with weapons of mass destruction.

The U.S. is spending ONE BILLION $$$ PER WEEK in a so-far unsuccessful attempt to subdue a pissant country like Iraq.

Just how far will three billion bucks go in ONE YEAR to threaten the WHOLE #&%!$'in' world????

That's after vIoLiN's buddy Saddam spends millions of that money on cocaine, hookers and Scotch whiskey.

The math is a bit fuzzy!”

“Uh, three billion $$$ per year, that is.”

“Don't worry anybody! Everyone who thought we should have gone in from the beginning still thinks so, everyone who thinks we shouldn't have still think so...

Although it is reassuring that fewer and fewer people think that Bush is a competent President”

“It's so interesting to see how they are changing the argument. It's "we can't wait for inspections or more UN deliberations, he's got tons of stuff he could use on us any day."

Now its: "he continued to harbor ambitions" "he wanted weapons" "we couldn't just stand by and do nothing..." even the French agreed with all that - when the US decided to go to war.

Like a lot of us have been saying (SMB this time)... the evidence uncovered so far makes an excellent case for inspections and sanctions.

If the US had waited a while for inspections and deliberation - while inspections and sanctions stayed in place, we could have had much more of the world in there with us. Odds of success would be much better, things would be happening faster and the cost would be much less in terms of lives lost and money spent.

Or, who knows, maybe inspections and sanctions would have worked this time - now that they had real teeth. Or, maybe, thats what Wolfowitz and Cheney (and maybe GWB) were afraid of.”

“Radio: Bush outlines plan to stop spread of WMD
Saturday, February 14, 2004 Posted: 12:25 PM EST (1725 GMT)
WASHINGTON -- President Bush emphasized on Saturday the need to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction, stressing the dangers of chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons getting in the hands of terrorists.

"The possibility of secret and sudden attack with weapons of mass destruction is the greatest threat before humanity today," Bush said in his weekly radio address.

The president said the United States is developing plans for the possibility of attacking each and every country possessing weapons of mass destruction.”

“Published in the February 20 - 26, 2004 issue of the LA Weekly
Soldier for the Truth: Exposing Bush’s Talking-Points War
by Marc Cooper

After two decades in the U.S. Air Force, Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, now 43, knew her career as a regional analyst was coming to an end when — in the months leading up to the war in Iraq — she felt she was being “propagandized” by her own bosses.

With master’s degrees from Harvard in government and zoology and two books on Saharan Africa to her credit, she found herself transferred in the spring of 2002 to a post as a political/military desk officer at the Defense Department’s office for Near East South Asia (NESA), a policy arm of the Pentagon.

Kwiatkowski got there just as war fever was spreading, or being spread as she would later argue, through the halls of Washington. Indeed, shortly after her arrival, a piece of NESA was broken off, expanded and re-dubbed with the Orwellian name of the Office of Special Plans. The OSP’s task was, ostensibly, to help the Pentagon develop policy around the Iraq crisis.

She would soon conclude that the OSP — a pet project of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld — was more akin to a nerve center for what she now calls a “neoconservative coup, a hijacking of the Pentagon.”

Though a lifelong conservative, Kwiatkowski found herself appalled as the radical wing of the Bush administration, including her superiors in the Pentagon planning department, bulldozed internal dissent, overlooked its own intelligence and relentlessly pushed for confrontation with Iraq.

Deeply frustrated and alarmed, Kwiatkowski, still on active duty, took the unusual step of penning an anonymous column of internal Pentagon dissent that was posted on the Internet by former Colonel David Hackworth, America’s most decorated veteran.

As war inevitably approached, and as she neared her 20-year mark in the Air Force, Kwiatkowski concluded the only way she could viably resist what she now terms the “expansionist, imperialist” policies of the neoconservatives who dominated Iraq policy was by retiring and taking up a public fight against them.

She left the military last March, the same week that troops invaded Iraq. Kwiatkowski started putting her real name on her Web reports and began accepting speaking invitations. “I’m now a soldier for the truth,” she said in a speech last week at Cal Poly Pomona. Afterward, I spoke with her.

L.A. WEEKLY: What was the relationship between NESA and the now-notorious Office of Special Plans, the group set up by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney? Was the OSP, in reality, an intelligence operation to act as counter to the CIA?

KAREN KWIATKOWSKI: The NESA office includes the Iraq desk, as well as the desks of the rest of the region. It is under Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Bill Luti. When I joined them, in May 2002, the Iraq desk was there. We shared the same space, and we were all part of the same general group. At that time it was expanding. Contractors and employees were coming though it wasn’t clear what they were doing.

In August of 2002, the expanded Iraq desk found new spaces and moved into them. It was told to us that this was now to be known as the Office of Special Plans. The Office of Special Plans would take issue with those who say they were doing intelligence. They would say they were developing policy for the Office of the Secretary of Defense for the invasion of Iraq.

But developing policy is not the same as developing propaganda and pushing a particular agenda. And actually, that’s more what they really did. They pushed an agenda on Iraq, and they developed pretty sophisticated propaganda lines which were fed throughout government, to the Congress, and even internally to the Pentagon — to try and make this case of immediacy. This case of severe threat to the United States.

You retired when the war broke out and have been speaking out publicly. But you were already publishing critical reports anonymously while still in uniform and while still on active service. Why did you take that rather unusual step?

Due to my frustration over what I was seeing around me as soon as I joined Bill Luti’s organization, what I was seeing in terms of neoconservative agendas and the way they were being pursued to formulate a foreign policy and a military policy — an invasion of a sovereign country, an occupation, a poorly planned occupation. I was concerned about it; I was in opposition to that, and I was not alone.

So I started writing what I considered to be funny, short essays for my own sanity. Eventually, I e-mailed them to former Colonel David Hackworth, who runs the Web page Soldiers for the Truth, and he published them under the title “Insider Notes From the Pentagon.” I wrote 28 of those columns from August 2002 until I retired.

There you were, a career military officer, a Pentagon analyst, a conservative who had given two decades to this work. What provoked you to become first a covert and later a public dissident?

Like most people, I’ve always thought there should be honesty in government. Working 20 years in the military, I’m sure I saw some things that were less than honest or accountable. But nothing to the degree that I saw when I joined Near East South Asia.

This was creatively produced propaganda spread not only through the Pentagon, but across a network of policymakers — the State Department, with John Bolton; the Vice President’s Office, the very close relationship the OSP had with that office. That is not normal, that is a bypassing of normal processes. Then there was the National Security Council, with certain people who had neoconservative views; Scooter Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff; a network of think tanks who advocated neoconservative views — the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Security Policy with Frank Gaffney, the columnist Charles Krauthammer — was very reliable. So there was just not a process inside the Pentagon that should have developed good honest policy, but it was instead pushing a particular agenda; this group worked in a coordinated manner, across media and parts of the government, with their neoconservative compadres.

How did you experience this in your day-to-day work?

There was a sort of groupthink, an adopted storyline: We are going to invade Iraq and we are going to eliminate Saddam Hussein and we are going to have bases in Iraq. This was all a given even by the time I joined them, in May of 2002.

You heard this in staff meetings?

The discussions were ones of this sort of inevitability. The concerns were only that some policymakers still had to get onboard with this agenda. Not that this agenda was right or wrong — but that we needed to convince the remaining holdovers. Colin Powell, for example. There was a lot of frustration with Powell; they said a lot of bad things about him in the office. They got very angry with him when he convinced Bush to go back to the U.N. and forced a four-month delay in their invasion plans.

General Tony Zinni is another one. Zinni, the combatant commander of Central Command, Tommy Franks’ predecessor — a very well-qualified guy who knows the Middle East inside out, knows the military inside out, a Marine, a great guy. He spoke out publicly as President Bush’s Middle East envoy about some of the things he saw. Before he was removed by Bush, I heard Zinni called a traitor in a staff meeting. They were very anti-anybody who might provide information that affected their paradigm. They were the spin enforcers.

How did this atmosphere affect your work? To be direct, were you told by your superiors what you could say and not say? What could and could not be discussed? Or were opinions they didn’t like just ignored?

I can give you one clear example where we were told to follow the party line, where I was told directly. I worked North Africa, which included Libya. I remember in one case, I had to rewrite something a number of times before it went through. It was a background paper on Libya, and Libya has been working for years to try and regain the respect of the international community. I had intelligence that told me this, and I quoted from the intelligence, but they made me go back and change it and change it. They’d make me delete the quotes from intelligence so they could present their case on Libya in a way that said it was still a threat to its neighbors and that Libya was still a belligerent, antagonistic force. They edited my reports in that way. In fact, the last report I made, they said, “Just send me the file.” And I don’t know what the report ended up looking like, because I imagine more changes were made.

On Libya, really a small player, the facts did not fit their paradigm that we have all these enemies.

One person you’ve written about is Abe Shulsky. You describe him as a personable, affable fellow but one who played a key role in the official spin that led to war.

Abe was the director of the Office of Special Plans. He was in our shared offices when I joined, in May 2002. He comes from an academic background; he’s definitely a neoconservative. He is a student of Leo Strauss from the University of Chicago — so he has that Straussian academic perspective. He was the final proving authority on all the talking points that were generated from the Office of Special Plans and that were distributed throughout the Pentagon, certainly to staff officers. And it appears to me they were also distributed to the Vice President’s Office and to the presidential speechwriters. Much of the phraseology that was in our talking points consists of the same things I heard the president say.

So Shulsky was the sort of controller, the disciplinarian, the overseeing monitor of the propaganda flow. From where you sat, did you see him manipulate the information?

We had a whole staff to help him do that, and he was the approving authority. I can give you one example of how the talking points were altered. We were instructed by Bill Luti, on behalf of the Office of Special Plans, on behalf of Abe Shulsky, that we would not write anything about Iraq, WMD or terrorism in any papers that we prepared for our superiors except as instructed by the Office of Special Plans. And it would provide to us an electronic document of talking points on these issues. So I got to see how they evolved.

It was very clear to me that they did not evolve as a result of new intelligence, of improved intelligence, or any type of seeking of the truth. The way they evolved is that certain bullets were dropped or altered based on what was being reported on the front pages of the Washington Post or The New York Times.

Can you be specific?

One item that was dropped was in November [2002]. It was the issue of the meeting in Prague prior to 9/11 between Mohammed Atta and a member of Saddam Hussein’s intelligence force. We had had this in our talking points from September through mid-November. And then it dropped out totally. No explanation. Just gone. That was because the media reported that the FBI had stepped away from that, that the CIA said it didn’t happen.

Let’s clarify this. Talking points are generally used to deal with media. But you were a desk officer, not a politician who had to go and deal with the press. So are you saying the Office of Special Plans provided you a schematic, an outline of the way major points should be addressed in any report or analysis that you developed regarding Iraq, WMD or terrorism?

That’s right. And these did not follow the intent, the content or the accuracy of intelligence . . .

They were political . . .

They were political, politically manipulated. They did have obviously bits of intelligence in them, but they were created to propagandize. So we inside the Pentagon, staff officers and senior administration officials who might not work Iraq directly, were being propagandized by this same Office of Special Plans.

In the 10 months you worked in that office in the run-up to the war, was there ever any open debate? The public, at least, was being told at the time that there was a serious assessment going on regarding the level of threat from Iraq, the presence or absence of WMD, et cetera. Was this debated inside your office at the Pentagon?

No. Those things were not debated. To them, Saddam Hussein needed to go.

You believe that decision was made by the time you got there, almost a year before the war?

That decision was made by the time I got there. So there was no debate over WMD, the possible relations Saddam Hussein may have had with terrorist groups and so on. They spent their energy gathering pieces of information and creating a propaganda storyline, which is the same storyline we heard the president and Vice President Cheney tell the American people in the fall of 2002.

The very phrases they used are coming back to haunt them because they are blatantly false and not based on any intelligence. The OSP and the Vice President’s Office were critical in this propaganda effort — to convince Americans that there was some just requirement for pre-emptive war.

What do you believe the real reasons were for the war?

The neoconservatives needed to do more than just topple Saddam Hussein. They wanted to put in a government friendly to the U.S., and they wanted permanent basing in Iraq. There are several reasons why they wanted to do that. None of those reasons, of course, were presented to the American people or to Congress.

So you don’t think there was a genuine interest as to whether or not there really were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

It’s not about interest. We knew. We knew from many years of both high-level surveillance and other types of shared intelligence, not to mention the information from the U.N., we knew, we knew what was left [from the Gulf War] and the viability of any of that. Bush said he didn’t know.

The truth is, we know [Saddam] didn’t have these things. Almost a billion dollars has been spent — a billion dollars! — by David Kay’s group to search for these WMD, a total whitewash effort. They didn’t find anything, they didn’t expect to find anything.

So if, as you argue, they knew there weren’t any of these WMD, then what exactly drove the neoconservatives to war?

The neoconservatives pride themselves on having a global vision, a long-term strategic perspective. And there were three reasons why they felt the U.S. needed to topple Saddam, put in a friendly government and occupy Iraq.

One of those reasons is that sanctions and containment were working and everybody pretty much knew it. Many companies around the world were preparing to do business with Iraq in anticipation of a lifting of sanctions. But the U.S. and the U.K. had been bombing northern and southern Iraq since 1991. So it was very unlikely that we would be in any kind of position to gain significant contracts in any post-sanctions Iraq. And those sanctions were going to be lifted soon, Saddam would still be in place, and we would get no financial benefit.

The second reason has to do with our military-basing posture in the region. We had been very dissatisfied with our relations with Saudi Arabia, particularly the restrictions on our basing. And also there was dissatisfaction from the people of Saudi Arabia. So we were looking for alternate strategic locations beyond Kuwait, beyond Qatar, to secure something we had been searching for since the days of Carter — to secure the energy lines of communication in the region. Bases in Iraq, then, were very important — that is, if you hold that is America’s role in the world. Saddam Hussein was not about to invite us in.

The last reason is the conversion, the switch Saddam Hussein made in the Food for Oil program, from the dollar to the euro. He did this, by the way, long before 9/11, in November 2000 — selling his oil for euros. The oil sales permitted in that program aren’t very much. But when the sanctions would be lifted, the sales from the country with the second largest oil reserves on the planet would have been moving to the euro.

The U.S. dollar is in a sensitive period because we are a debtor nation now. Our currency is still popular, but it’s not backed up like it used to be. If oil, a very solid commodity, is traded on the euro, that could cause massive, almost glacial, shifts in confidence in trading on the dollar. So one of the first executive orders that Bush signed in May [2003] switched trading on Iraq’s oil back to the dollar.

At the time you left the military, a year ago, just how great was the influence of this neoconservative faction on Pentagon policy?

When it comes to Middle East policy, they were in complete control, at least in the Pentagon. There was some debate at the State Department.

Indeed, when you were still in uniform and writing a Web column anonymously, you expressed your bitter disappointment when Secretary of State Powell — in your words — eventually “capitulated.”

He did. When he made his now-famous power-point slide presentation at the U.N., he totally capitulated. It meant he was totally onboard. Whether he believed it or not.

You gave your life to the military, you voted Republican for many years, you say you served in the Pentagon right up to the outbreak of war. What does it feel like to be out now, publicly denouncing your old bosses?

Know what it feels like? It feels like duty. That’s what it feels like. I’ve thought about it many times. You know, I spent 20 years working for something that — at least under this administration — turned out to be something I wasn’t working for. I mean, these people have total disrespect for the Constitution. We swear an oath, military officers and NCOs alike swear an oath to uphold the Constitution. These people have no respect for the Constitution. The Congress was misled, it was lied to. At a very minimum that is a subversion of the Constitution. A pre-emptive war based on what we knew was not a pressing need is not what this country stands for.

What I feel now is that I’m not retired. I still have a responsibility to do my part as a citizen to try and correct the problem.

Copyright 2004 LAWeekly”