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Array
(
[sid] => 19287
[catid] => 1
[aid] => Mick
[title] => WEAPONS OF MASS DISAPPEARANCE
[time] => 2003-06-19 12:05:00
[hometext] =>
[bodytext] => White House Office Meeting Bush: Okay, now listen up you guys! I want a complete inventory done around here. Someone’s stolen Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and we’ve gotta find them! They were definitely there and now they’re not. What I mean is someone told me they were definitely there so they were definitely there! Voice from the back: Who told you? Bush: Well, er, I didn’t get his name, you know all these secret service types have to remain anonymous. (whisper) That’s convenient… Bush I have every confidence in the CIA. Adviser Wasn’t it the CIA who said those forged documents about Iraq buying uranium in Niger were genuine? Bush Well, yes… Adviser And wasn’t it the CIA who supplied Hans Blix with all those WMD sites that when they investigated them they found nothing? Bush Well, yes… Voice from the back: And you are STILL confident?! Bush Oh yes, absolutely comnfident! (Whisper) If brains were taxed, he'd get a rebate…. O? 'Iraq had a weapons program,' Bush said yesterday after a meeting of his Cabinet... 'Intelligence throughout the decade showed they had a weapons program. I am absolutely convinced with time we'll find out that they did have a weapons program.' Even in making that stout defense, though, Bush appeared to redefine the accusations being made about his administration's use of intelligence in rallying support for an attack on Iraq. Nobody disputes that Hussein had weapons programs at one point. At issue is whether Iraq pursued such programs after inspectors left in 1998 and whether Hussein continued to possess such weapons in quantities to threaten the United States. But Bush spoke of Iraq's weapons program, rather than its weaponry, and referred to it in the past tense. Asked to clarify Bush's remarks, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said Bush did not intend to make a distinction between weapons and weapons programs. 'The president, in saying programs, also applies that to weapons,' the spokesman said. Fleischer also said Bush believed Iraq had weapons when the war began. 'The president had repeatedly said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that includes everything knowable up to the opening shots of the war,' he said. 'We still have confidence in that information. You could say Iraq continues to have weapons of mass destruction. We have confidence we're going to find them. They're still there.' Bush's remarks were significantly more circumscribed than his statement two weeks ago that 'we found the weapons of mass destruction,' based on the discovery of two trailers that the CIA has said could have been used to produce biological warfare agents. Although no actual pathogens had been recovered, Bush asserted then that 'we'll find more weapons as time goes on.' A week later, Bush dropped the assertion that weapons had been found, saying instead that 'we're on the look' for the weapons and that Hussein had 'a big country in which to hide them.' On the eve of the war, on March 17, Bush asserted that 'intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.' Although it remains possible that proscribed weapons will be found in Iraq, even some administration advisers have come to the conclusion that weapons will not be found in the quantities described by the administration or in as menacing a form. Still, at yesterday's Cabinet meeting, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld announced, 'I'm convinced we'll find WMD,' one participant said. The question of whether the administration overstated the case against Iraq in the months before the war gained new attention last week with the emergence in public of an intelligence report from last fall saying there was 'no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing or stockpiling chemical weapons.' Lawmakers are considering probes of the intelligence related to Iraq and the administration's handling of it. Bush aides have given somewhat conflicting accounts of how intelligence about Iraq's weapons was used. Fleischer, asked yesterday about an inaccurate claim in Bush's State of the Union address in January that Iraq sought to buy uranium in Africa, said intelligence officials declared the charge incorrect 'as the information was received.' But national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said Sunday that 'somebody may have known' the information was false 11 months before Bush's speech. Rice also asserted Sunday of Iraq's weapons: 'No one ever said that we knew precisely where all of these agents were, where they were stored.' But on March 30, Rumsfeld had said: 'We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.' Yesterday, Bush also expressed irritation about a New York Times article yesterday reporting that two of the highest-ranking al Qaeda leaders in custody have told the CIA that the Iraqi government did not work with the terrorist group. Bush pointed to the involvement of 'al Zarqawi's network' in the killing of a U.S. diplomat. Although the Bush administration painted Abu Musab Zarqawi, head of a terrorist group called al Tawhid, as a central al Qaeda figure, the CIA viewed him as 'affiliated with al Qaeda,' meaning he had associated with some al Qaeda members but had his own agenda. The CIA 'always said, 'We can't make the connection, we can't take you there,' ' said a senior administration official. As for an 'operational connection' between al Qaeda and Iraq, the CIA 'didn't ever tell [the administration] there was one before the war.' More broadly, some intelligence officials said they were surprised at how definitive the Bush administration was in public about the links between al Qaeda and Iraq. Al Qaeda operative Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was captured shortly before the war began, told his interrogators that al Qaeda did not work with Iraq. 'The people I worked with were flabbergasted by statements coming out of the White House about the links to terrorism,' said an intelligence expert on Capitol Hill. CIA officials viewed these statements with skepticism, because they came from captured al Qaeda figures whose verifiable information was often false. But they passed them on to policymakers in summaries of interrogation debriefings. That intelligence became a source of frustration for some lawmakers who knew the information cast doubt on the administration's case linking Iraq with terrorism. But because the information was classified, they were not permitted to share those doubts with the public. Washington Post - 10 June 2003 O? [comments] => 3 [counter] => 233 [topic] => 43 [informant] => Steeleyes [notes] => [ihome] => 0 [alanguage] => english [acomm] => 0 [haspoll] => 0 [pollID] => 0 [score] => 0 [ratings] => 0 [editpoem] => 1 [associated] => [topicname] => oops )
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