THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ VI

PDid, Tenet's report to congress today claims that Bush never said Saddam had WMD's. The guy must be deaf or stupid or both.

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Lets BAN talking about wmd. I'm as guilty as anyone else but its so imprecise as to be almost meaningless.

If you mean nuclear weapons, say so.
Or chemical or biological weapons say so. Or if you mean any one or combination SUGGEST people say NBC weapons not wmd.

The only true weapon of mass destruction is a nuclear device. Germs and nerve agents don't flatten cities.

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PDiddie wrote:

Remind us again why we went to war in Iraq?

I read yesterday that when this fighting is over and Iraq is under "new management" it will (for social and economic reasons) be divided into three regions, Regular, Premium and Unleaded.

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Steve (as 41oo) wrote:

The only true weapon of mass destruction is a nuclear device. Germs and nerve agents don't flatten cities.

There have been a lot of your posts Steve that I have agreed with completely ( I may not have posted to say so) but this one I have to disagree with.

Atomic bombs leave total devastation, nothing left--whats the point of that?

Nerve gas kills everyone and leaves the country intact for the victor to inherit, isn't that much better from the victors point of view?

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In the past I have given the benefit of the doubt to the British Intelligence services, SIS MI5 MI6 etc.

They contain many many dedicated brave hard working and loyal people. By the nature of their work their success stories are secret. But we inevitably get to know about failures.

However, it is a pretty dismal record of failure. Not helped by being dependent for most of the sigint from US sources. In fact British Intelligence is really a branch of the NSA. No matter how well you analyse stuff, if the basic stuff is crap its hard to produce nuggets of gold.

As my old schoolmaster used to say to me regarding computers, "rubbish in rubbish out".

That's part of the problem. Too many spooks sit at computer screens. Since Saddam murdered three Intelligence operatives in 1979 we have had virtually no humint from Iraq. Most of the stuff is extrapolation from what people thought they knew several years ago.

But this doesn't excuse the intelligence services. It just means we are not good at it, for many reasons. But where there is just cause for criticism is the self serving belief that we are good at it. And even more so in the uncritical acceptance and failure to weigh intelligence material in the balance by the elected political masters.

British Intelligence, for all its dedication, for all its good efforts, actually has a pretty appalling record of actually GETTING IT RIGHT. From failure to round up the atom bomb spies of the 1950's, penetration of MI5, to failure to heed warnings from the French about Islamic militants in London.

Blair should have been cognescent of all that when he made the decision to take us to war. He is giving every impression currently that he was not.

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Steve (as 41oo) wrote:

Lets BAN talking about wmd. I'm as guilty as anyone else but its so imprecise as to be almost meaningless.

If you mean nuclear weapons, say so.
Or chemical or biological weapons say so. Or if you mean any one or combination SUGGEST people say NBC weapons not wmd.

The only true weapon of mass destruction is a nuclear device. Germs and nerve agents don't flatten cities.

How about ....WTWFYU

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Handy little recap of what Bush and administration officials actually claimed about Iraq...
http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2004/02/05/iraq_quotes/index.html

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Steve, I don't know why we must ban our talk about WMDs. Bush said, ""The dictator of Iraq and his weapons of mass destruction are a threat to the security of free nations.'' March 16, 2003.

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Blair et al are now saying the 45 minute use of WofMD were in battle field conditions. How is that a threat to national security Question

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Especially since we were responsible for "exposing" our military to battle field conditions.

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What a paradox, hmmmmmmmmm! The truth behind the Bush lies Wink

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Here's Krugman's article on Iraq's WMD's.
*****************************
Get Me Rewrite!
February 6, 2004
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Right now America is going through an Orwellian moment. On
both the foreign policy and the fiscal fronts, the Bush
administration is trying to rewrite history, to explain
away its current embarrassments.

Let's start with the case of the missing W.M.D. Do you
remember when the C.I.A. was reviled by hawks because its
analysts were reluctant to present a sufficiently alarming
picture of the Iraqi threat? Your memories are no longer
operative. On or about last Saturday, history was revised:
see, it's the C.I.A.'s fault that the threat was
overstated. Given its warnings, the administration had no
choice but to invade.

A tip from Joshua Marshall, of www.talkingpointsmemo.com,
led me to a stark reminder of how different the story line
used to be. Last year Laurie Mylroie published a book
titled "Bush vs. the Beltway: How the C.I.A. and the State
Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror." Ms. Mylroie's
book came with an encomium from Richard Perle; she's known
to be close to Paul Wolfowitz and to Dick Cheney's chief of
staff. According to the jacket copy, "Mylroie describes how
the C.I.A. and the State Department have systematically
discredited critical intelligence about Saddam's regime,
including indisputable evidence of its possession of
weapons of mass destruction."

Currently serving intelligence officials may deny that they
faced any pressure - after what happened to Valerie Plame,
what would you do in their place? - but former officials
tell a different story. The latest revelation is from
Britain. Brian Jones, who was the Ministry of Defense's top
W.M.D. analyst when Tony Blair assembled his case for war,
says that the crucial dossier used to make that case didn't
reflect the views of the professionals: "The expert
intelligence experts of the D.I.S. [Defense Intelligence
Staff] were overruled." All the experts agreed that the
dossier's claims should have been "carefully caveated";
they weren't.

And don't forget the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans,
created specifically to offer a more alarming picture of
the Iraq threat than the intelligence professionals were
willing to provide.

Can all these awkward facts be whited out of the historical
record? Probably. Almost surely, President Bush's
handpicked "independent" commission won't investigate the
Office of Special Plans. Like Lord Hutton in Britain - who
chose to disregard Mr. Jones's testimony - it will brush
aside evidence that intelligence professionals were
pressured. It will focus only on intelligence mistakes, not
on the fact that the experts, while wrong, weren't nearly
wrong enough to satisfy their political masters. (Among
those mentioned as possible members of the commission is
James Woolsey, who wrote one of the blurbs for Ms.
Mylroie's book.)

And if top political figures have their way, there will be
further rewriting to come. You may remember that Saddam
gave in to U.N. demands that he allow inspectors to roam
Iraq, looking for banned weapons. But your memories may
soon be invalid. Recently Mr. Bush said that war had been
justified because Saddam "did not let us in." And this
claim was repeated by Senator Pat Roberts, chairman of the
Senate Intelligence Committee: "Why on earth didn't
[Saddam] let the inspectors in and avoid the war?"

Now let's turn to the administration's other big
embarrassment, the budget deficit.

The fiscal 2005 budget report admits that this year's
expected $521 billion deficit belies the rosy forecasts of
2001. But the report offers an explanation: stuff happens.
"Today's budget deficits are the unavoidable result of the
revenue erosion from the stock market collapse that began
in early 2000, an economy recovering from recession and a
nation confronting serious security threats." Sure, the
administration was wrong - but so was everyone.

The trouble is that accepting that excuse requires
forgetting a lot of recent history. By February 2002, when
the administration released its fiscal 2003 budget, all of
the bad news - the bursting of the bubble, the recession,
and, yes, 9/11 - had already happened. Yet that budget
projected only a $14 billion deficit this year, and a
return to surpluses next year. Why did that forecast turn
out so wrong? Because administration officials fudged the
facts, as usual.

I'd like to think that the administration's crass efforts
to rewrite history will backfire, that the media and the
informed public won't let officials get away with this.
Have we finally had enough?

E-mail: [email protected]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/06/opinion/06KRUG.html?ex=1077077136&ei=1&en=81a0310da8960743

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They finally released the ingredients in Viagra:
3% Vitamin E
2% Aspirin
2% Ibuprofen
1% Vitamin C
5% Spray Starch
87% Fix-A-Flat

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You want the truth? You can't handle the truth.
***************************************
Secret Obsessions at the Top
February 7, 2004
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

To unravel our intelligence failures in Iraq, it helps to
look back at what was once one of the most secret and scary
chapters in U.S.-Soviet relations. An intelligence failure
risked nuclear war in the 1980's - but this was a mistake
by the K.G.B.

In 1981, we now know, the K.G.B. chairman said at a secret
conference that President Ronald Reagan was planning to
launch a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. The
Soviets became consumed with the U.S. threat, just as the
Bush administration became obsessed with the Iraq threat.
The K.G.B. ordered all its offices in NATO countries to
seek evidence of Mr. Reagan's plans for a pre-emptive
nuclear strike, and they code-named the effort RYAN.

Once K.G.B. officers knew what Moscow wanted, they found
"evidence" everywhere of Mr. Reagan's secret plans for a
nuclear strike - confirming Moscow's worst fears.

Then NATO held a nuclear launching exercise in November
1983, playing into the Soviet alarm. The K.G.B. mistakenly
reported to Moscow that NATO was on an actual alert. The
Soviets put their own forces on alert and braced for a
nuclear attack.

It was "one of the worst nuclear scares since the Cuban
missile crisis - and Washington didn't even know it until
after it was over," James Risen and Milt Bearden write in
their terrific book about the spy wars, "The Main Enemy."

The parallels between our Iraq intelligence mess and RYAN
are telling. When a country's capital is in the grip of
hard-line ideologues who demand a certain kind of
intelligence, they'll get it. The result is an intelligence
failure. And, more fundamentally, it's a political failure
by the top leaders themselves.

So to me, the administration's recent effort to blame the
intelligence community for the Iraq mess is as misleading
as the drive to war itself. Nothing the C.I.A. did was as
harmful as the way administration officials systematically
misled Americans about the incomplete and often
contradictory mountain of intelligence.

For example, in September 2002 the Defense Intelligence
Agency issued a still-classified report saying "there is no
reliable information" on whether Iraq had chemical weapons.
Yet in the same month Donald Rumsfeld was telling a House
committee the opposite: "We do know that the Iraqi regime
currently has chemical and biological weapons of mass
destruction, and we do know they are currently pursuing
nuclear weapons."

I've been canvassing people in the intelligence community,
and one person at D.I.A. tells me: "I never saw anything
that justified the idea that Saddam was an immediate
threat, or that we knew with certainty what he had.
Everything I saw was laced with `possibles' and
`probables'; in fact, what I saw about those aluminum
tubes, for instance, seemed to me to leave the impression
that they probably were not nuclear-related."

Lt. Col. Dale Davis, a former Marine counterintelligence
officer now at the Virginia Military Institute, says he
hears from his former intelligence colleagues that top
officials "cherry-picked the intel for the most damning,
and often least reliable, tidbits and produced alarming
conclusions - the 45-minute chemical attack scenario, the
African uranium and the Al Qaeda connection. The C.I.A.
never supported these assertions."

Another person with long experience in military
intelligence put it this way: "Everyone knew from the start
that there was no smoking gun and the assessment was based
on speculation, anecdote and outdated information, not
current evidence. We didn't have the `humint' [human
intelligence] capability to confirm anything one way or the
other."

The administration could have been truthful, saying that
the intelligence about W.M.D. was incomplete but alarming -
and that in any case Saddam was a monster. Instead,
officials from the president down warned us that unless we
went to war, we risked a mushroom cloud at home.

That was worse than an intelligence failure. That was
dishonesty.

Here's an update on Srey Mom, one of the teenage girls
whose freedom I purchased in Cambodia. After fleeing her
village and returning to the brothel, Srey Mom met this
week with my interpreter and aid workers. She agreed to try
again to start over, and she has moved to Phnom Penh. She
is living with a family and will learn to be either a
hairdresser or a model (details can be found at
nytimes.com/kristofresponds or in the updated multimedia
feature). So maybe fairy-tale endings are possible.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/07/opinion/07KRIS.html?ex=1077163839&ei=1&en=e3f9a74afebc74dd

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According to a recent survey in the Independent, most people in Britain (54%) think that Blair lied over the reasons for the Iraq war and a majority (51%) think he should resign.

I have always supported Tony Blair. But I too think he should now step down. The problem is that the Tory leader has demanded his resignation. That's just going to make him more determined to stay on.

There is an alternative however. Blair could tell the truth about the real reasons for the American invasion of Iraq and Britain's support for it. But that of course will never happen. So its left to us to work it out for ourselves.

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From the Baghdad blogger, Salam Pax....

In a simple small room with blue mattresses laid on the floor to sit on, Ayatollah Sistani, one of his sons and an assistant met a group of Sunni university professors, tribe leaders and dignitaries. During the 3 hour meeting not one single verse from the Quran was recited, he expressed his fear that federalism might lead to the fragmentation of Iraq and said that if the elections had to be delayed for legitimate reasons he will endorse the delay. My father came back from this meeting quite awed.

In preparation for the transition of power to Iraqi hands there have been numerous conferences and discussion groups, starting at neighborhood levels and going up to more specialized discussions. This has been going on for quite a while and I know that he (my father) was invited to a couple of them to talk, I read one of the papers he wrote on forms of representation, he's a caucus type of guy. Which kind of makes sense in the current situation, the country is not really ready for a direct one vote per citizen type of thing. Security issues and fraud and the lack of experienced people to monitor the elections come into play.

Anyway, after a couple of those meetings a group of Sunni participants were invited to go and talk to al-Sistani. My father didn't tell me the [what and how] because he knows I'll blog it, (my family used to tell me things before they knew about this bad habit I have). But he came back quite impressed saying things like "you wouldn't find a more secular Imam" which is of course an oxymoron, but it could have been the fact that it was late and he had nothing to eat the whole day. My mom sat with her hands crossed giving him the [ha! So what did you think you'll meet? A raving lunatic?] look - just I case you are new to this, my father is a non-praying Sunni, my mother is a praying Shia (a Sistani shia) and I think the Quran is a very boring novel.

Apparently there is another meeting planned but no one is telling me when. What impressed my father was the fact that Sistani is much more moderate than the media portrays him. He is very flexible about the way these elections should look like, and sees no problem in them going along in stages. He is also ready to endorse a postponement of these elections if there is no agreement on how they should take place. What he does mind is any form of intermediate stage, if it didn't work out at the planned time we should keep the status quo until we find a way. He said something along the lines that increasing the Governing Council from 25 to 250 will change nothing, and if the Americans move what they have in their left hand to their right hand it is still in their possession. Basically, either do it right or don't, which sounds reasonable.

Another interesting thing he said is that Allah gave people the capacity to govern themselves and no one has the right to take that privilege from them, he doesn't see Iraq as a theocracy like Iran.
All in all a bit confusing. So is he hard-line Shia or not? And why, after staying out of the political game for so long, has he become so central?

More importantly; how can I get that [I'm a blogger] stain out of my clothes? My cousins stop talking when I come into the room unless I swear I won't put it online.
:: salam 2:47 AM [+] ::

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I hope Sistani survives this transition, if he's killed that place is going to come apart.

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Steve, I think that people on both sides of the Pond are waiting to see what comes of this. The skepticism in the US about the commission is, of course, because the members are appointed by Bush. I do not know how they could have been chosen otherwise, but I want to think it could have been managed to disarm the skeptics.

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Bush not only selected the members of the commission, but even dictated the time line.

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Quote:

Britain spied on UN allies over war vote

Security Council members 'illegally targeted' by GCHQ after plea from US security agency

Martin Bright and Peter Beaumont
Sunday February 8, 2004
The Observer

Britain helped America to conduct a secret and potentially illegal spying operation at the United Nations in the run-up to the Iraq war, The Observer can reveal.

The operation, which targeted at least one permanent member of the UN Security Council, was almost certainly in breach of the Vienna conventions on diplomatic relations, which strictly outlaw espionage at the UN missions in New York.

Translators and analysts at the Government's top-secret surveillance centre GCHQ were ordered to co-operate with an American espionage 'surge' on Security Council delegations after a request from the US National Security Agency at the end of January 2003. This was designed to help smooth the way for a second UN resolution authorising war in Iraq.

The information was intended for US Secretary of State Colin Powell before his presentation on weapons of mass destruction to the Security Council on 5 February.

Sources close to the intelligence services have now confirmed that the request from the security agency was 'acted on' by the British authorities. It is also known that the operation caused significant disquiet in the intelligence community on both sides of the Atlantic.

An operation of this kind would almost certainly have been authorised by the director-general of GCHQ, David Pepper. But the revelation also raises serious questions for Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, who has overall responsibility for GCHQ.

Details of the operation were first revealed in The Observer on the eve of war last year, after the leaking of a top-secret memo from the NSA requesting British help.

But until today it was not known whether British spy chiefs had agreed to participate. The operation was ordered before deliberations over a second UN resolution and targeted the so-called 'swing nations' on the Security Council - Chile, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Angola, Guinea and Pakistan - whose votes were needed to proceed to war.

The first evidence has also emerged that China, a perma nentmember of the Security Council, was a likely target of the operation.

The Observer has discovered that a GCHQ translator, Katherine Gun, 29, who faces trial after leaking details of the US request, was hired by the surveillance centre as a Chinese language specialist. Documents of this level of secrecy are circulated on a strict 'need-to-know' basis. Security experts have said that it is highly unlikely that someone as junior as Gun would have seen the memo had she not been expected to use her language expertise in the operation.

She is thought to be an expert translator of Mandarin, the language of Chinese officialdom.

The memo, dated 31 January, 2003, stated that the security agency wanted to gather 'the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals or to head off surprises'.

It was sent out four days after the UN's chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, produced his interim response on Iraqi compliance with UN resolutions.

In the wake of the Hutton report and the establishment of inquiries into intelligence failures on both sides of the Atlantic, the Gun case represents a further risk to government credibility over the Iraq war, showing how far the US and Britain were prepared to go in their ultimately unsuccessful attempts to persuade the world of the case for UN support for war against Iraq.

The Gun trial will reopen embarrassing questions for the Government over the conflicting views on the legality of war which were debated in the run-up to the conflict. At the time when the memo was received at GCHQ, officials at the Foreign Office, Ministry of Defence and in the intelligence services - including senior legal advisers - were expressing serious doubts over the legality of any invasion.

At the time, The Observer was told by Foreign Office officials of serious doubts that the war was legal.

When the GCHQ revelations were first published in The Observer last March, the Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, had still not publicly announced his final advice to Downing Street.

At the time, it was expected that he would agree with most experts in international law that intervention would be unlawful without a second resolution.

The legality of the war was a highly sensitive issue for senior military officers on the eve of war, who were wary of being accused of war crimes in the aftermath of the conflict.

The former assistant chief of defence staff Sir Timothy Garden said that the legal basis of the war is all the more important now that Britain has signed up to the International Criminal Court.

'We did it on the best advice that was available in a democratic country. But following an order is not an excuse in the end.'

SOURCE

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THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ VI

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