YOUR PLANET IS DOOMED

Ian Duncan Smith on Iraqi WMD

2008-05-24T15:16:00.010Z

In the process of going through my 2003 quote folder I came across this, from Ian Duncan Smith, former leader of the UK Conservative Party.

"[Saddam's weapons] pose a clear danger to British citizens. To those who doubt that, I point out that only the other day Saddam said that he would strike anywhere, 'by land, sea or sky'. Those who believe otherwise are living in cloud cuckoo land."

Had to share.

Pretext

2008-05-23T21:59:00.009Z

Let's assume for arguments sake that Iran has secretly crafted several nuclear weapons. And let us momentarily concede that Iran has developed a projectile capable of delivering such a payload. Let's also agree, arguendo, that the Iranian leadership has plans to propel these weapons at Israel, with the connivance of its military commanders. Now, having arrived at this point, can someone please explain how Iran can attack Israel without also killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, and without contaminating the whole area?

Twenty-thousand plus Iranian Jews are being pressed to leave Iran - not by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but by Israel. And where do they hope to home them? Uh, in Israel, the same place Iran is supposed to be about to nuke. What rot!

Saddam fooled the world. Honest he did

2008-01-27T21:20:00.002Z

Remember all those chilling statements the Iraqi dictator made about, um, retaining weapons of mass destruction and, er, how he was going to launch them at us?

From the Situation Room:

"Fascinating new insight into Saddam Hussein's final days now emerging, including shocking details of his interrogation, in which he admitted he was bluffing about having weapons of mass destruction." (video)

No, me neither.

Asked whether Iraq had active stockpiles of WMD in 2003, he reportedly answered: "No, of course not. The U.S. dreamed them up itself to have a reason to go to war with us."

"He's not been very cooperative", said an intelligence official with direct knowledge of the initial interrogation.

Aye, I can believe that.

The other thing is casualties

2007-09-24T18:05:00.006Z

The Los Angeles Times noted of the Iraq Survey Group report in 2004:

Saddam and his aides were convinced that their chemical and biological weapons saved the Baath party regime after a U.S.-led military coalition forced Iraqi troops out of Kuwait in 1991. U.S. and allied troops halted their advance deep in southern Iraq...

Saddam and his aides told interrogators they thought Bush left him in power because U.S. officials knew of his orders to load and disperse his nerve gases and germ agents, and his orders that the weapons were to be used if U.S. troops entered Baghdad.

Reconsider now this 1994 interview in which Dick Cheney defended the decision to terminate the military advance. With modern-day occupation of Iraq a bloody disaster, a scene of crime, attention focused on the obvious: "Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place? ... It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq."

A lot of people are asking what changed?, yet too few people seem to provide a coherent answer. Saddam's lethal arsenal of chemical and biological weapons were an equal if not more persuasive reason not to press on; an implicit factor in evaluating potential human death. Might this be what Cheney had in mind when he added:

The other thing is casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact that we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had ... 146 American's dead ... and the question for the president in terms of whether we went on to Baghdad ... was how many additional dead Americans was Saddam worth?

Enter the United Nations Special Commission. It certainly made sense for troops to withdraw as disarmament experts moved forward, taking into consideration former weapon inspector Scott Ritter's view that

disarmament was only useful insofar as it facilitated regime change. And that's what people need to understand, that this was not about getting rid of weapons that threatened international peace and security. This has been about, since 1991, solving a domestic political embarrassment. And that is the continued survival of Saddam Hussein, a man who in March 1990 was labeled as a true friend of the American people and then in October 1990 in a dramatic flip-flop was called the Middle East equivalent of Adolf Hitler.

Attacking Iran - fine. Repression of the Iraqi civilian population - we can live with it. Annexing the oil fiefdom of Kuwait - unacceptable. Someone call a locksmith!

Iraq appeared ripe for regime change. The weapons, formerly an obstacle to achieving that goal, were long gone. As former British Secretary of State Robin Cook pointed out when he resigned his cabinet position in 2003, "it is only because Iraq's military forces are so weak that we can even contemplate its invasion." If true, Cheney dare not admit it. To do so would endanger his liberty.

DUMBEX

2007-08-01T23:47:00.005Z

The US Director of National Intelligence, John McConnell, has issued a new Intelligence Community Directive on captured document and media exploitation (DOMEX). Having commented on this subject before, I would draw your attention to one particular aspect of the IC directive:

D.-----POLICY

1.-----Pursuant to the IRTPA, the DNI is committed to: 1) ensuring efficient integration of IC elements and their collection, analysis, production, and dissemination activities; 2) establishing and maintaining an effective, reliable, and collaborative capability; 3) providing maximum availability of DOMEX to all customers; 4) optimizing resource utilization; 5) and establishing effective burden sharing.

2.-----Within the IC:

[...]

c.-----IC elements will leverage burden sharing, partnerships, and outside capabilities (IC, public, private, other U.S. government and foreign partners), minimize unnecessary duplication of effort, and align DOMEX standards and procedures within the IC and between the IC and other government DOMEX activities to the maximum extent possible. (Emphasis mine)

A good idea in theory, one might conclude. In practice it is reckless and dangerous. And that's because the public "burden sharing" initiative was born of political expediency. The new directive should therefore raise serious concern that we could see a repeat of October last year when documents and schematic drawings of Iraq's defunct nuclear programme were posted on the Internet.

Not that public recruitment made any sense to begin with. This avenue tends to be one-way because, somewhat surprisingly, all of the material is examined and exploited by analysts prior to publication. As was made clear during an April 2006 US House of Representatives Hearing on The Iraq Documents:

Daniel Butler: First of all, all of the documents have been looked at. They do receive a very quick triage, and as I was starting to describe, at a very tactical level they're looked at quickly. Then they receive a much more in-depth evaluation further to the rear, in the AOR, and then they go back. They are eventually entered into this database that Colonel Woods has made reference to, the Harmony database, which makes all of those documents then available to the entire intelligence community to then exploit. The database is designed in such a way that an analyst can get a very quick sense of what is in the document from a thing we refer to as "the gist", basically a linguist's—

Adam Schiff: At what level—

Daniel Butler: —summary of what is in the document.

Adam Schiff: If I could just interrupt again because I only have five minutes. What level would the decision have been made that the release of this document on the Russian potential intelligence cooperation, what level would the decision have been made that that report - unreviewed, unscrutinized and unverified - could be disclosed without injuring our relationship with Russia, or creating a whole host of other issues?

Daniel Butler: Well, the documents are scrutinized. They're scrutinized in a variety of ways. Again, during the triage process from the tactical level to the operational level and then at a strategically level back here in the US. The documents receive quite a bit of scrutiny.

The new directive is all the more perplexing because there is not a single example of a member of the public submitting valuable feedback on these documents that I am aware. Rather, because of the filtering process described in part below, the results are more often unproductive.

Daniel Butler: Our policy is to try and release as many documents as possible, and to lean forward in that regard and be biased toward release, if at all possible, recognizing that there are some— there is information in many of these documents that would be inconvenient for some constituencies; in this case perhaps the Russians, or for individuals that might be identified in documents. But our release criteria specifically protect US persons or US citizens in that regard. But we do not endeavour to protect the citizens of other governments, or in this case the Russian government.

[...]

Dana Rohrabacher: Well, I am very happy to hear that there are some people who were involved with releasing information that are patriotic people who want to make sure that they're watching out for the interests of the United States. They should not be watching out for the interests of Russia at the same level that they watch out for the interests of the United States of America.

I say only partially described because the preceding release didn't stop at defaming opponents of the Iraq war or sowing confusion by mixing in unrelated materials. Taped discussions and written accounts were frequently posted minus meeting dates, or any indication of when they may have taken place. The context and meaning of these discussions often proved ambiguous. Unbeknown to the public, the majority of them actually described operational, planning or development work during the 1980s and early 1990s. This, in turn, led to an explosion of conjecture that Iraqi scientists were still working on potent weapons programmes prior to the 2003 invasion.

Poorly chosen private partners have also proven unreliable.

And so if the director of national intelligence is genuinely committed to establishing effective burden sharing, and if his office is to learn anything from the distribution of captured "Operation Iraqi Freedom" documents, then it is that public and private loons should play no part.

Since I have returned to this topic, I may as well include this final snippet:

William Delahunt: But talking about the relationship between the United States and Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, Mr. Butler, has any of your research discovered documents relative to our relationship and interaction with the Saddam Hussein regime, from say 1982 to the Gulf War of 1990?

Daniel Butler: Congressman, I have only been involved with the policymaking with respect to document release.

William Delahunt: Colonel Woods?

Kevin Woods: Yes, sir, there are going back into the eighties. Most of it is on economic issues, attempting to find ways to get more material support or political support or economic support during the war with Iran.

It's highly unlikely that these records will ever see daylight. We still have yet to fully understand how the Central Intelligence Agency supplied Iraq with non-US origin weaponry, including Soviet arms and technology, through its secret Bear Spares military aid programme.

Wiping Israel off the map?

2007-02-17T19:55:00.007Z

I stitched this video together after reading Arash Norouzi's news piece, The Rumor of the Century.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's obnoxious behaviour is not in contention - the issue at hand is what he did or didn't say, what he is or isn't advocating. There is no shortage of effigy burning and it's not unusual to hear shouts of "death to America" or "death to Israel", yet as outrageous as this behaviour continues to be, it's not certain confirmation that he called for Israel to be wiped off the map (by means of military science). The nature of this hostility predates his tenure, and so I'm inclined not to take it as a new and sudden declaration of intent.

Ahmadinejad clearly finds Israeli expansion at the expense of the Palestinian people wholly unacceptable. To this end, he talks about the need for regime change: "As the Soviet Union disappeared, the Zionist regime will also vanish." Since the Soviet Union was not atom-bombed out of existence, there is no necessary military connotation in what he said. Elsewhere he appears to be calling for a one-state solution with all people living side-by-side: "Our suggestion is that the five million Palestinian refugees come back to their homes, and then the entire people on those lands hold a referendum and choose their own system of government. This is a democratic and popular way." Failing this, however, Palestinians have every right to self-defence.

It is not proper to take a misquotation, twist and stretch it some more, and ignore every piece of information that invalidates it.

Alas, members of the Republican Party are not going to hobble humiliated to the next election with 'loser' stamped broadly across their forehead. American-Israeli military intervention would be a disaster for most people in the region and almost certainly delay the natural collapse of the Iranian system. In the meantime we can throw our weight behind Iranian resistance movements and campaigns like CASMII.

Update #1: BBC Editors accepted my comment. Let's hope they were listening.

Update #2: Obviously not. The demonisation continues. This time on BBC Radio 4's premiere comedy programme, Moral Maze. Check it out. It's ludicrous.

And men loved darkness

2007-02-09T00:42:00.004Z

A document can be a dangerous thing, especially if it contains highly sensitive information that, if disclosed, could jeopardise national security. Some are withheld from inspection for less worthy reasons. A number of documents made public at the trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr. fall into both categories. As always, blogger eRiposte at The Left Coaster is immediately on the case. He is currently sharing his insightful analysis of them over at Firedoglake.

One particular Central Intelligence Agency product dated March 2003, and how it was reproduced for the public by the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in June 2004, raises serious questions of its former chairman Pat Roberts. "It took us a year and interviewing over 240 analysts and working with the CIA overtime in regards to redaction and what we thought should be made public and what they thought should be held in terms of national security", Roberts told BBC Newsnight after concluding the first post-war intelligence review. Recent disclosures present us with an opportunity to test his words.

Here's a snippet of the aforementioned intelligence product, selectively sanitised by the Roberts Committee:

A centerpiece of the British White Paper last fall was UK concern over Iraqi interest in foreign uranium. Given the fragmentary nature of the reporting,
CIA had recommended that the UK not use this information in their paper. (page 70)

And the same extract again, revealed at Libby's trial:

A centerpiece of the British White Paper last fall was UK concern over Iraqi interest in foreign uranium. Given the fragmentary nature of the reporting, CIA had recommended that the UK not use this information in their paper. (page 2)

The rationale for this redaction has nothing to do with national security.

I alluded to this kind of self-serving secrecy in an earlier blog post having noticed British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw being uncooperative before the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Select Committee (FAC). They had questioned, almost in passing, whether the United States had expressed any uncertainty in relation to the claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking to purchase and transport huge quantities of natural uranium from Africa to Iraq. This was the response, let me remind you, from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to questions from the FAC, 16 June, 2003.

Question: Did the "significant quantities of uranium" evidence come from a single source, or from mutually corroborating multiple sources? Was there any corroboration at all for this claim? (Did the US accept that the claim was sound?) Are you satisfied that documents on this are genuine?

Answer: The document stated on p 25 that "there is intelligence that Iraq has sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa." This reference drew on intelligence reporting from more than one source. We understand that the IAEA acquired documents on this subject in February 2003. At no stage prior to the publication of the dossier did the UK possess or have sight of these documents. The IAEA have confirmed that the documents were not provided by the UK, contrary to some media reporting. Since the publication of the dossier, we have had the opportunity to examine the documents. Some of these documents are forgeries, others are still under consideration.

So did the United States accept that the claim was sound? Jack Straw avoided answering the question. The FAC instead had to discover the answer from a rather unexpected source.

Besieged by questions and criticisms from reporters and commentators in America over the veracity of the claim, CIA Director George Tenet was compelled to issue a press statement on 11 July. He divulged that the agency had indeed advised caution to their British colleagues over including any reference to the claim in their September 2002 dossier. This unhelpful disclosure caused a serious row and raised yet more questions of the British Foreign Secretary at home (the two countries should be working closely together to create a new narrative, not contradicting each other in public). Committee Chairman Donald Anderson, freshly informed, wrote back to Straw on 15 July and continued to press him for answers throughout the remainder of the year. These additional exchanges were published alongside their Second Report of Session 2003-2004 and have gone largely unnoticed.

[...]

4. What were the terms in which the CIA expressed its reservations to the British Government about the uranium from Africa element of the September 2002 dossier, and on what date or dates were those reservations expressed?

Just before the dossier was finalised, the CIA offered a comment noting that they did not regard the reference to the supply of uranium from Africa as credible. But the CIA provided no explanation for their concerns. UK officials were confident that the dossier's statement was based on reliable intelligence. A judgement was therefore made by the JIC Chairman to retain the reference.

5. Why did neither you nor your officials disclose to the Committee, in either your written or oral evidence, before the Committee published its recent report that the CIA had expressed reservations to the British Government on the uranium from Africa element in the September dossier - particularly when you were specifically asked by a member of the Committee in your public evidence on June 27 why the British Government did 'at least not put some degree of health warning' over the uranium from Africa statements in the September 2002 dossier?

British officials saw no need to put a health warning on the claim, because they were confident in the intelligence underlying it. The reference in the dossier was based on intelligence from more than one source. We had not shared this intelligence with the CIA, nor were we in a position to do so, for reasons explained during the private evidence session.

6. On receipt of the CIA's reservations, which you say in your letter were 'unsupported by explanations', about the uranium from Africa element in the September 2002 dossier, did any British official ask for an explanation of the CIA's reservations? If not, why not? If so, what was the CIA's response?

UK intelligence officials have regular exchanges with their counterparts in the CIA.

Anderson again wrote to Straw on 21 August.

I wish to follow up two of the responses which in my view could have been more helpful.

In Question 6, I asked whether, on receipt of the CIA's reservations about the uranium from Africa claim, any British official asked for an explanation; and if not, why not. You replied that "UK intelligence officials have regular exchanges with their counterparts in the CIA." May I have a more complete and informative answer to the question?

In his reply of 8 September, Straw said that he could not provide more information to the question because "exchanges between UK intelligence officials and their opposite numbers in the US are confidential." Unsatisfied with this, Anderson wrote once more on 29 October:

I am disappointed that you feel unable to supply further information on the CIA's reservations on the uranium from Africa claim. [...] If the Director of the CIA is prepared to describe the contacts between his service and the UK, I do not see why you have felt so constrained in your replies to the Committee's questions. Will you now seek the agreement of the CIA to make a full disclosure to the Committee of the exchanges which took place last year about the uranium from Africa claim?

Straw reiterated his earlier answer: "As I said in my letter of 8 September, it would not be appropriate to provide details of intelligence exchanges with CIA." He then referred Anderson to the work of the Intelligence and Security Committee - now regarded, almost everywhere, as a whitewash - which had also looked at the same issue behind closed doors. That is where the exchange ended, so far as I am aware, with the shutters firmly pulled down, perhaps to block a potentially damaging line of inquiry. And so the question still remains: What exactly did the British government know and when did they know it? The new version of their story, which basically amounts to blaming the French, does not stand up.

It is disappointing that the Butler Committee didn't push this further, and in doing so, publish in their report an accurate summary of the exchanges between both intelligence services. Instead, as eRiposte has documented and my own research corroborates, the Butler panel tried to play down the whole affair and even went out of their way to find more (flimsy) evidence, long after the fact, to support the original allegation.

Shasta Hussein, Commander of the Martians

2006-10-14T02:45:00.012Z

Joseph Shahda, amateur sleuth, has identified another open source Iraq document that alludes to the real mastermind who attacked the United States on 11 September.

"Coded Letter" to Saddam written in English Dated September 2001.

Document CMPC-2003-004963 is a "coded" handwritten letter in English from a person called Amelia Rovena Guadagno to Saddam Hussein dated September 2001. The writer of the coded letter is asking Saddam to "Nuclear the United States as required and as soon as possible as this is September 2001". In fact the document later on indicates that this letter was written on or before September 8 2001. I have no idea what this letter means, whether it is a hoax, whether it is true, but someone may find something about it that it is not clear to the naked eye.

We are given to understand that there is probably something in this "coded letter" not entirely clear to the average reader. But what exactly is it?

Click here for the original letter and here for a discernible reproduction.

As ever, Shahda nudges his readers in the wrong direction: Coded Iraqi action plan > bomb blast > United States > September 2001.

When one examines the document (ahem, I mean coded letter, wink-wink, nudge-nudge), it's hard not to laugh. Take just these few omitted snippets for example:

The weather was wrong again today also in Newburgh, New York. I wore the brown dress anyway!

And the moon's a balloon is not greer or geer as I proved.

And as of the Commander of the Martians I'm the only one remaining.

And just because Arnold S. did a Total Recall based on this article does not mean Naziism of Adolf is the right thing. And just because Sylvester S. did Rocky does not mean the Gottfrieds are Sly's Salvation of Judge Dredd.

Current affairs just aren't what they used to be. The USA can't even do love affairs without messing up. No pun.

They finally found the real God and what did they do? They consulted Debra. Now, understand, there are two Debra's. One is now a blonde still trying to understand who is Commander Shasta, and the other is really Cupid who went on strike even for possibly Macintosh.

Can you crack the martian code?

No indisputable proof in this sphere

2006-10-06T04:06:00.005Z

Recently I tried searching for a transcript of President Jacques Chirac and President Vladimir Putin's February 2003 joint press conference. An incomplete CNN transcript was the nearest thing I could find. That's when I popped over to Google France, where I quickly discovered this missing piece:

Jacques Chirac: "As far as France is concerned, we are ready to envisage everything that can be done under UNSCR 1441. [...] But I repeat that every possibility offered by the present resolution must be explored, that there are a lot of them and they still leave us with a lot of leeway when it comes to ways of achieving the objective of eliminating any weapons of mass destruction which may exist in Iraq. I'd like nevertheless to note that, as things stand at the moment, I have, to my knowledge, no indisputable proof in this sphere."

Witness the speed with which the corporate press reported the French president's clearly stated and important reservation.

Uranium from Christopher Hitchens' bottom

2006-09-21T04:21:00.017Z

"He was quite cutting about the claim that uranium had been sought from Africa. ... My source believed that the documents on which the allegation rested were forged." — Former BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan, June 19 2003

"We know that in the 1980s Iraq purchased more than 270 tonnes of uranium from Niger. Therefore, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility - let us at least put it like that - that Iraq went back to Niger again. That is why I stand by entirely the statement that was made in the September dossier." — Prime Minister Tony Blair, July 16 2003

"Iraq's a big place and there's lots of sand. ... It is impractical to dig up the whole of Iraq, but for somebody to say we are absolutely certain that there is nothing there would be a very rash and unfounded thing to say, in our judgment." — Lord Butler of Brockwell, July 14 2004

~~~~~

Did Iraqi diplomat Wissam al-Zahawie go uranium shopping in Niger? Christopher Hitchens certainly thinks so (the man will not shut up about it).

It is not my intention to refute all he has written, however I thought it would be a good idea to examine one or two of his most recent statements (highlighted here in bold). And so in no particular order, Hitchens writes...

"The subsequent mysteriously forged documents claiming evidence of an actual deal made between Zahawie and Niger were circulated well after the first British report... The original British report carefully said that Saddam had 'sought' uranium, not that he had acquired it."

The same British report in draft form said that Iraq had "purchased" large quantities of uranium (see here pages 6 and 29). Paul Waugh, Deputy Political Editor of The Independent, wrote upon learning of this crucial detail:

The controversial claim that Iraq bought uranium from Africa was stated as fact in an early draft of the Government's dossier, new documents before the Hutton inquiry show.

The revelation that the claim was originally much stronger will fuel suspicions that Britain was forced to amend its dossier after warnings from the CIA that the Niger link was unproven.

It also suggests that the UK was so anxious to portray Saddam as a nuclear threat that it decided to keep even a weakened version of the allegation in its dossier.

"Since the war in Iraq began, two independent British inquiries have firmly reiterated that the original intelligence concerning Niger was sound, and has withstood careful scrutiny..."

The Foreign Affairs Select Committee's Ninth Report of Session 2002-03 did not conclude likewise.

This might be a little tedious but allow me to reproduce select portions of noteworthy memoranda and minutes of evidence from British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw (accompanied by William Ehrman) before that committee. There is a serious point to be made below.

SECTION ONE: WITH REFERENCE TO THE DOCUMENT IRAQ'S WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

[...]

Question: Did the "significant quantities of uranium" evidence come from a single source, or from mutually corroborating multiple sources? Was there any corroboration at all for this claim? (Did the US accept that the claim was sound?) Are you satisfied that documents on this are genuine?

Answer: The document stated on p 25 that "there is intelligence that Iraq has sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa." This reference drew on intelligence reporting from more than one source. We understand that the IAEA acquired documents on this subject in February 2003. At no stage prior to the publication of the dossier did the UK possess or have sight of these documents. The IAEA have confirmed that the documents were not provided by the UK, contrary to some media reporting. Since the publication of the dossier, we have had the opportunity to examine the documents. Some of these documents are forgeries, others are still under consideration.

Q: Was the wording of the "significant quantities of uranium" claim given on p 25 of the document Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction, exactly the same as it was in the intelligence assessment supplied to the Government? If so, was it accompanied in the intelligence assessment by qualifications not included in the public document?

A: The reporting post dated the last JIC assessment of Saddam's nuclear programme. But the language used in the document was approved by the JIC.

[...]

Q: How was the original evidence in support of the "significant quantities of uranium" claim tested? When did Ministers conclude that some of the evidence was unreliable? Does there remain any reliable evidence for this claim?

A: See above. The information about the forged documents first emerged in February 2003 when the IAEA declared documents it had received concerning the Iraq/uranium/Niger issue were fabricated. We cannot comment on the origin or history of these documents. As noted above, the statement in the dossier drew on intelligence reporting from more than one source. This intelligence remains under review.

And the same again, only this time minutes of evidence:

EXAMINATION OF WITNESSES (QUESTIONS 1260-1279)

Sir John Stanley: What was the date, Foreign Secretary, on which the British Government complied with its obligations under the two Security Council resolutions and passed the firm intelligence that it had, which underpinned what was in the September 2002 document, to the IAEA?

Mr Straw: I will ask Mr Ricketts and Mr Ehrman to give more detail, but–

Sir John Stanley: I just want the date, I do not want a long response. I am just asking a very simple question. I am asking your officials if you cannot give the answer. I want to know, please, the date, that is all I am asking for. What was the date on which the British Government complied with its Security Council obligations to pass information on to the IAEA?

Mr Straw: I am going to give an answer and, if I may, I will give the answer in my own way…

Sir John Stanley: [...] We are talking about fresh intelligence which came to your Government and which underpinned putting into the September 2002 dossier the detailed statements that were made in emphatic terms about uranium supplies to Africa. That intelligence was under the obligation of your Government to pass on to the IAEA. When was it done?

Mr Ehrman: The intelligence came from a foreign service and we understand that it was briefed to the IAEA in 2003.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office later submitted in written evidence further supplementary answers to questions raised by the FAC during oral session.

IRAQI ATTEMPTS TO PROCURE URANIUM

1. The statement in the Government's published Assessment on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) that Iraq sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa was based on intelligence information received in 2002 from more than one source. We did not have intelligence that Iraq had actually acquired uranium: the dossier was clear on this point.

2. We asked the originators of our intelligence information to discuss this issue with the IAEA. We understand that this was done shortly before the IAEA report of 7 March 2003.

[...]

To summarise: At no stage prior to the publication of the September 2002 dossier – in which Iraq is categorically said to have sought the supply of substantial quantities of uranium from Africa – did the British government "possess" or "have sight" of the forged documents. The government's assessment was based on foreign intelligence reporting received in 2002 from more than one source – this information remains under review. The question "did the United States accept that the claim was sound" goes ignored, however the British government asked the originators of their intelligence information to discuss the issue with the IAEA, which they understand was done shortly before the IAEA report of March 7, 2003.

The committee smelt a rat:

60. We conclude that it is very odd indeed that the Government asserts that it was not relying on the evidence which has since been shown to have been forged, but that eight months later it is still reviewing the other evidence. The assertion "…that Iraq sought the supply of significant amounts of uranium from Africa …" should have been qualified to reflect the uncertainty. (Report)

When in January 2004 Lynne Jones MP wrote the Secretary of State to ask whether or not the British government had asked the owners of their intelligence if they may be permitted to share it with selected third parties, possibly in the hope of having it widely tested, Jack Straw once more confirmed that this specific reporting had already been briefed to the IAEA: "The government asked the originators of the intelligence that Iraq sought the supply of uranium from Africa to discuss the issue with the International Atomic Energy Agency. The government understand this was done shortly before the IAEA report of 7 March 2003. I am withholding further details of intelligence exchanges with allies under Exemption 1(c) of Part 2 of the Code of Practice on Access to Government Information."

Lynne Jones subsequently contacted the IAEA to question whether a third party had discussed or shared separate intelligence with them and, if so, what assessment they made of it. IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky responded to Jones in May 2004: "I can confirm to you that we have received information from a number of member states regarding the allegation that Iraq sought to acquire uranium from Niger. However, we have learned nothing which would cause us to change the conclusion we reported to the United Nations Security Council on March 7, 2003 with regards to the documents assessed to be forgeries and have not received any information that would appear to be based on anything other than those documents."

The IAEA had carefully pieced all of the fragmented evidence together. They interviewed Zahawie separately. It all collapsed under scrutiny. Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei's statement to the UN Security Council can still be found on the IAEA website along with his Fifteenth Consolidated Report.

But you must forget about all of that. Forget it. Instead Hitchens would rather turn your attention to a second British inquiry – one altogether more supportive. It was conducted by the Intelligence and Security Committee and chaired by former Labour cabinet minister Ann Taylor (more on her shortly). "It is frankly not a very good report," journalist Michael Smith told me. I agree with him. Nevertheless, the report threw up some interesting details that otherwise might never have escaped into the light. Pages 27-28 of their succinct report reads:

THE 24 SEPTEMBER 2002 DOSSIER

Uranium from Africa

87. The claim that Iraq had expressed an intention to obtain uranium from Africa was not included in the JIC Assessments prior to September 2002. The SIS told the Committee that this was because the initial intelligence was not acquired until June 2002 and the JIC did not produce an assessment on the Iraqi nuclear programme between June and September. However, the intelligence was included in the Iraqi WMD paper that was circulated for comment in August and in the first draft of the dossier, produced on 10 September.

88. In the foreword to the dossier the Prime Minister said:
"What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam… continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons."
The executive summary states that:
"As a result of the intelligence, we judge that Iraq has…. sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa, despite having no active civil nuclear programme that could require it,"
while the main body of the text stated that:
"… there is intelligence that Iraq has sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
89. The Committee questioned the Chief of the SIS about the reporting behind these statements. We were told that it came from two independent sources, one of which was based on documentary evidence. One had reported in June 2002 and the other in September that the Iraqis had expressed interest in purchasing, as it had done before, uranium from Niger. GCHQ also had some sigint concerning a visit by an Iraqi official to Niger.

90. The SIS's two sources reported that Iraq had expressed an interest in buying uranium from Niger, but the sources were uncertain whether contracts had been signed or if uranium had actually been shipped to Iraq. In order to protect the intelligence sources and to be factually correct, the phrase "Iraq has sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa" was used. At the time of producing the dossier, nothing had challenged the accuracy of the SIS reports.

91. In February 2003 the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) received from a third party (not the UK) documents that the party had acquired in the autumn of 2002 and which purported to be evidence of Iraq's attempts to obtain uranium from Niger. In March 2003 the IAEA identified some of the documents it had received as forgeries and called into question the authenticity of the others.

92. The third party then released its documents to the SIS. The SIS then contacted its source to check the authenticity of its documentary evidence. The SIS told us that its source was still conducting further investigations into this matter.

93. The SIS stated that the documents did not affect its judgement of its second source and consequently the SIS continues to believe that the Iraqis were attempting to negotiate the purchase of uranium from Niger.

Now you might want to read that again because the significance of this cannot be underestimated. Blogger Josh Marshall: "By saying the [unauthentic] documents didn't affect the judgment on the second source, we can fairly infer that they did affect the judgment of the first." And so, with a single question, the Intelligence and Security Committee learn from the Secret Intelligence Service what the Foreign Affairs Committee could not get out of Jack Straw in ten - a thinly veiled admission that a major piece of intelligence was in some way connected to the forgeries, and therefore unsound.

This must remain a sore point because key officials refuse to answer precision-guided smart-questions regarding the exact nature of this intelligence, nor will they openly talk about the investigation pertaining to the authenticity of said evidence (the ex-chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee is also ignoring all such requests for answers).

And so I think we have enough information to tentatively conclude that the British most likely received a written summary and/or a verbatim copy of the bogus document(s). This would mean Jack Straw was not necessary lying when he said at no time prior to the publication of the dossier did the UK "possess" or "have sight" of the forgeries (i.e. the original source material). It would appear, however, that Prime Minister Tony Blair crossed way over the line when he said: "The evidence that we had that the Iraqi Government had gone back to try to purchase further amounts of uranium from Niger did not come from these so-called 'forged' documents, they came from separate intelligence."

Also take a moment to consider the following point. If, as Jack Straw declared, they had "absolutely no knowledge of any documents relating to this area being forged" until March 2003, then what possible reason can they provide for shunning what must therefore have appeared to be perfectly good intelligence material, particularly at a time when they were desperately soliciting as much evidence as possible? They cannot have it both ways, nor can they seriously claim they were out of the loop.

We now move forward in time to the Butler Review. A five-member panel of privy counsellors hand-picked from inside Number 10 Downing Street, this inquiry had only the single backing of Tony Blair's New Labour party (the Liberal Democrats declined to take part, predicting "another whitewash" because the role of politicians had been excluded from the inquiry's remit, and the Conservative Party withdrew their support soon after). The committee also met entirely in secret and its terms of reference were so tightly drawn it guaranteed the key questions the British people were asking could not be fully answered.

Although highly critical in parts, the Butler Report eventually cleared ministers – and, by extension, George Bush – of making unfounded statements on the specific issue of uranium. This did not come as a surprise to the committee's critics, who suggested the review lacked integrity. And not without good reason. A year earlier, on the day of the publication of the ISC report, committee member Michael Mates adjudged that there had been no misconduct or wrongdoing and that misunderstanding stemmed from the government's honest desire to enlighten the public in a manner not attempted before: "This is the first time ever that a Government has put sensitive intelligence into the public domain." No blame should be apportioned to any individual politician or intelligence officer, added the former Guards colonel. He was seen as a safe pair of hands and an obvious choice for any new investigation. Much worse, Ann Taylor was one of a select few people trusted enough by Tony Blair to receive an early draft of the September 2002 dossier, which she helped shape and fashion. Private Eye magazine underscored the absurdity of her appointment to the Butler Review panel:

On 18 September 2002 an official in Blair's office sent this memo to chief of staff Jonathan Powell and Alastair Campbell: "The PM has asked Ann Taylor to read through the dossier in draft and give us any comments. He stressed that it is for her and for her only and that no one else outside this building was seeing it in draft. I'm contacting John Scarlett to work out how this should happen – needs to be tomorrow."

Taylor went to Scarlett's office at 8 o'clock the next morning, read the dossier and gave her comments to the spy chief – who then passed them on to Blair. She advised that it "needs to come across as an impartial, professional assessment of the threat", and that the PM should "undercut critics" by explaining why Saddam should be stopped now.

So the only person outside No 10 and the JIC who was trusted to help with the dossier (and who also expressed a wish to see Blair's critics undercut) is now sitting on the inquiry into its contents. One wonders why Blair didn't go the whole hog and add Alastair Campbell to Lord Butler's team of independent inquisitors.

Was the appointment of Taylor a secondary attempt at damage limitation? I do believe so. As Lynne Jones correctly observed: "It is self-evidently bad practice to appoint someone to a committee when their previous conclusions are under scrutiny."

"According to Mark Huband, the national security correspondent of the Financial Times, in an important front-page article he wrote on June 28, 2004, the consensus among European intelligence services was that Niger was attempting to deal in yellowcake with anyone it could find, from North Korea to Iran."

I am well aware of that front-page article and at least one important other. Several days later, presumably after being briefed by a source close to the Prime Minister, Mark Huband exclusively revealed that the Butler Inquiry was set to vindicate the government and endorse its handling of uranium intelligence material. That Huband most likely received his inside information directly from Downing Street should be of noted concern.

In his June 28 piece, Huband delivered the information that, from 1999 onwards, unidentified sources had picked up repeated discussion of an unlawful trade in uranium from Niger:

The FT has now learnt that three European intelligence services were aware of possible illicit trade in uranium from Niger between 1999 and 2001. Human intelligence gathered in Italy and Africa more than three years before the Iraq war had shown Niger officials referring to possible illicit uranium deals with at least five countries, including Iraq.

"The same information was passed to the United States", Huband added only later.

Nuclear trafficking is of course a very serious concern and experience tells counter-proliferation units to stay vigilant. However, this specific reporting advanced no proof that Saddam had anything to do with these unidentified rogue traders – real or imagined. Rather, it seems that various individuals simply deduced that Iraq might be a potentially interested partner.

James Astill also reported seeing similar evidence in 2002. The CIA questioned the sourcing and after careful investigation uncovered evidence that directly contradicted the original reporting. Yet, the Butler committee (and Hitchens) expect us to accept reporting that is so plainly unreliable even the Bush administration was compelled to drop it. More precisely, the Butler Report states that "there was further and separate intelligence that in 1999 the Iraqi regime had also made inquiries about the purchase of uranium ore in the Democratic Republic of Congo." In this case, "there was some evidence that by 2002 an agreement for a sale had been reached."

Agreeing with the American assessment is Professor Hugues Leclercq, a specialist of the Democratic Republic of Congo's economy and mining sector, who said that the British accusation amounted to "pure fantasy". The uranium mine in question is at Shinkolobwe in the southern province of Katanga; the material there was used to make the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In the 1960s its two main uranium shafts were flooded and sealed with concrete blocks after the deposit had been extensively mined-out, rendering any remaining ore completely inaccessible. In the late 1990s and early 2000, cobalt mining was permitted adjacent to the old site, which led to uncontrolled and dangerous mining activities. Prof. Leclercq says trace elements of uranium might be found in the surrounding area but it is very doubtful that illicit excavation would produce anything other than minimal results. Lacking hard evidence, "I'm sure that not a single UN inspector" could believe the British material, he told New African magazine.

In July 2003, National Security Council spokesman Michael N. Anton confirmed that the Americans had separate sources of information too. However, the "other reporting that suggested that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Africa [was] not detailed or specific enough for us to be certain that such attempts were in fact made. Because of this lack of specificity," he continued, "this reporting alone did not rise to the level of inclusion in a presidential speech…".

This assorted intelligence reporting was every bit as flimsy, and so it is of some interest that Lord Butler felt the need to drag it back up.

"In order to take the Joseph Wilson view of this Baathist ambassadorial initiative, you have to be able to believe that Saddam Hussein's long-term main man on nuclear issues was in Niger to talk about something other than the obvious."

Of course, on that particular trip, Wissam al-Zahawie visited not just Niger but also Burkina Faso, Benin and Congo-Brazzaville. As Cambridge University academic Glen Rangwala explains, Iraq would

send delegations all over the world, including Africa, to sign free trade agreements. The Iraqis weren't really interested in trade, but in getting sanctions lifted. They were holding out the promise of cheap oil to buy the votes of poor countries which might end up on the Security Council. Their main strategy was to isolate the US and Britain on the sanctions issue.

But let's turn this around and fire it straight back at Hitchens. If Saddam was covertly shopping around for uranium, would he really send his top "long-term main man on nuclear issues" to go and secure it? Zahawie posed freely for photographers and his picture was published in a local paper. The trip was also reported by at least one European press agency. Hitchens need not answer the question since he stands accused of overstating Zahawie's knowledge and experience in this field. Zahawie has himself twice replied to Hitchens and on both occasions he addressed this and many other points.

Not that we should uncritically take Zahawie at his word. As the International Atomic Energy Agency correctly assessed before the war, and what we can now state with absolute certainty, Iraq did not have an active nuclear programme, nor did it have the means or resources to restart a project of such magnitude any time soon. No enrichment facilities existed in Iraq with which to process natural uranium into weapons grade material. So why risk being discovered negotiating for material you can do nothing with? And exactly how would a massive shipment of radioactive material make it from Niger to Iraq without being detected? As Private Eye reports, a previously classified paper written by US intelligence says that

an alleged plan for "500 tons" of uranium "to be delivered [in two phases] in one year" was unlikely because it would mean "25 hard to conceal 10-ton tractor trailers would be used to transport the off-the-books uranium. Because Niger is landlocked, the convoy would have to cross at least one international border and travel at least 1,000 miles to reach the sea. Moving such a quantity over such a distance would be very difficult, particularly because the French would be indisposed to approve or cloak this arrangement". Even if the US did not fully share these words with British Intelligence, the UK could easily have made the same calculations, and seen that the claims in Blair's September Dossier were implausible...

The Butler Report acknowledges the destruction and dismantlement of all facilities built to "process, enrich and fabricate uranium" and the removal of "all potentially fissile material" from Iraq. It then states that "some unprocessed uranium ore" was left in the country. However this is not entirely correct. As theoretical physicist and nuclear expert Professor Norman Dombey pointed out, over 500 tonnes of uranium compound including yellowcake – uranium that has undergone the first stage of processing – remained under lock and key at Iraq's gutted Tuwaitha nuclear research center:

Iraq already had far more uranium than it needed for any conceivable nuclear weapons programme. ... Nuclear weapons are difficult and expensive to build not because uranium is scarce, but because it is difficult and expensive to enrich U235 from 0.7 per cent to the 90 per cent needed for a bomb. Enrichment plants are large, use a lot of electricity and are almost impossible to conceal. Neither British security services nor the CIA seriously thought Iraq had a functioning enrichment plant that would have justified all the noise about nuclear weapons we heard before the war.

When I read of the supposed Iraqi purchase of uranium from Niger, I thought it smelt distinctly fishy. ... It was a gigantic red herring.

It would have been infinitely easier if Saddam had simply reclaimed the material already sitting in Iraq. Of course, under ever-watchful eyes, none of this was ever going to happen. The very idea of Iraq reconstructing a nuclear programme is absurd. The most important thing for the warmongers, however, was having a seed of doubt firmly planted in the public mind.

The report concedes, "the CIA advised caution about any suggestion that Iraq had succeeded in acquiring uranium from Africa," but they, "agreed that there was evidence that it had been sought." These are weasel words. Every degree of light upon a subject can be classed as evidence, but evidence is not necessarily proof. For this reason CIA correctly discouraged White House officials from making any such allegation. Alas, the British went out on a limb.

And at least one other important distinction needs to be made. Contrary to what Hitchens claims, the Butler Committee did not say the intelligence was perfectly sound - they said the British government's assessment and statements, at that time, were well-founded.

We conclude that, on the basis of the intelligence assessments at the time, covering both Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the statements on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa in the Government's dossier, and by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons, were well-founded.

The British government almost certainty received written summaries of the unauthentic documentary evidence in 2002, but the British did not get to examine the source documents upon which they were based until 2003. And so, somewhat cryptically, the Butler Report concludes:

The forged documents were not available to the British Government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it.

The committee's reasoning goes something like this: Even though a major plank of the British Government's case was riddled with woodworm (excuse the analogy), because British officials were not aware of the infestation at the time their assessment was made, the fact of the rot is irrelevant. Ministers acted in "good faith". And that would be not so unreasonable if it wasn't for the fact the Americans had repeatedly warned the British, which all but the first inquiry chose to play down.

Again, Josh Marshall: "The authors of the earlier report felt free to be candid about what the Butler Report chose to keep hidden - namely, that most of the British judgment about 'uranium from Africa' was based on the phony documents the Butler Report claims had nothing to do with their judgment." And he is more or less right. Nowhere does the Butler committee explicitly state that a crucial piece of intelligence reporting was based on forgeries - they simply can't bring themselves to say it. Instead they go trawling ex post facto through the British intelligence waste bin for any supporting material, play word games and try to make it appear as though poor Tony was inundated with endless reams of intelligence when the complete opposite is true - they sent out desperate appeals for more.

When the forced removal of Saddam Hussein became an urgent component of British policy toward the United States, friendly foreign intelligence services were asked for any information pertinent to Iraq. When intelligence was obtained - no matter how ropey - the British were inclined to make their own independent analysis and assessment, even if their preferred reading and interpretation of the information did not sit too well with the country that owned the reporting. As I think I have reasonably established, the British obtained seriously flawed intelligence reporting. When their American counterparts offered words of warning, the British response was to tone down the language in the dossier (a rare exception, let me assure you), but they could not bring themselves to drop the reporting entirely. And when the shit finally hit the fan and the documentary evidence collapsed, the supplemental intelligence reporting was elevated and forced to bear the weight of the government's uranium accusation almost alone. Then, later, when government officials had recomposed themselves, people like Hitchens were encouraged to inject new life into a badly rotten tale. So if there remains untested evidence not yet disclosed, I doubt now it will ever see the light of day, because Tony Blair needs ambiguity and confusion like a gladiator needs a protective shield – something both he and Bush can use to conceal their bloody red face.

Update: To further demonstrate the point, read how the Republican-led US Senate Intelligence Committee abused its power to protect President George Bush.

Saddam bin Laden attacked us first

2006-09-12T00:02:00.002Z

Highly informed guests. On BBC Newsnight?

Alas, the depressing reality:

Presenter Jeremy Paxman: The accusation James Woolsey is that you've squandered the moral good judgement that you had of much of the rest of the world in an ill-conceived venture in Iraq and some very dubious practices in rendition and secret prisons and the like.

James Woolsey: (speaking by satellite) I know some people feel that way but you have to remember 9/11 came before Iraq and Bin Laden declared war on us in the mid 90s.

Is the BBC deliberately trying to kill all hope?

This is not accidental conflation. James Woolsey is a New American Century signatory. He naturally convinced himself that Iraq played a central role in directing the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks upon the United States. He was unofficial liaison to the Iraqi National Congress. He vouched for, and actively promoted, at least two fabricators. He testified that the 9/11 highjackers honed their skills using a crippled Boeing 707 inside Iraq.

As former CIA analyst Mel Goodman correctly observed, "Woolsey was a disaster as CIA director in the 90s and [he] is now running around this country calling for a World War IV to deal with the Islamic problem. This is a dangerous individual...".

Yes he is. A cursory examination of his remarks will reveal this. So why does Woolsey keep popping up on BBC television as some kind of independent expert?

We'll find evidence later...

2006-09-10T06:06:00.005Z

Here is an interesting January 2004 falsehood from Vice President Dick Cheney that has for some reason escaped the wide attention it most certainly deserves:

We haven't really had the time yet to pore through all those records in Baghdad. We'll find ample evidence confirming the link, that is the connection if you will between al Qaida and the Iraqi intelligence services. They have worked together on a number of occasions.

Cheney's hopeful prediction was made during an interview with Rocky Mountain News. The original page has since expired but the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine preserves several copies.

He was of course referring to the process of document exploitation, this most recent effort I have posted about once before.

Now reading the recently released Senate Intelligence Committee report, Postwar Findings about Iraq's WMD Programs and Links to Terrorism and How they Compare with Prewar Assessments, I find on pages 62-63:

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which is leading the exploitation effort of documents (DOCEX) uncovered in Iraq, told Committee staff that 120 million plus pages of documents that were recovered in Iraq have received an initial review for intelligence information.

[...]

DIA officials explicitly stated that they did not believe that the initial review process missed any documents of major significance regarding Iraq's links to terrorism. During an interview with Committee staff, the lead DIA analyst who follows the issue of possible connections between the Iraqi government and al-Qa'ida noted that the DIA "continues to maintain that there was no partnership between the two organizations."

Billmon.org has a great deal more. Cheney responds.

Prewar fantasy vs. postwar reality

2006-09-09T00:23:00.005Z

And for this long-awaited bout your commentator this evening is Larry Johnson:

WOW! WOW! and Wow! Message to Karl Rove and Dick Cheney — read it and weep baby. Cheney's newly appointed biographer, Stephen Hayes, is blown out of the water. Ditto Christopher Hitchens. Bottomline, Saddam rebuffed cooperation with Bin Laden, tried to capture Zarqawi, and did NOT repeat NOT train foreign terrorists at Salman Pak.

There is much to digest here. I'll probably post something sensible of my own later, when I'm not so drunk. In the meantime, please enjoy this short animation.

Saddam's doppelgangsters

2006-08-24T22:11:00.007Z

Independent studies now show that far from being anti-war, the BBC actually gave more airtime to pro-war views than any other broadcaster. But just how low did the BBC current affairs television programme Panorama go?

In 2002, BBC World Affairs editor John Simpson interviewed anyone who could dish more dirt on the soon-to-be-deposed Iraqi dictator, including, it seems, one graduate from the Jack White school of photographic interpretation.

The following transcript is indicative of that barrel scraping period.

Video | Transcript

John Simpson: For years Saddam Hussein has been fooling everyone. The German forensic scientist Dieter Buhmann, armed with the latest computer technology, has analysed thousands of hours of video footage and made an extraordinary discovery.

Dr. Dieter Buhmann: On the left side is the real Mr. Saddam Hussein, on the right side is the Mr. Hussein in the year, er, 94.

Simpson: He takes careful measurements of the images of the genuine Saddam. He knows there is one double but he's surprised at what he finds.

Buhmann: I found the left one is the real Saddam Hussein in the year 1990, the second is a double and that are the other doubles.

Simpson: Are you absolutely certain that those are four different men that we are looking at there?

Buhmann: I am absolutely sure.

Simpson: It's part survival technique, part a useful convenience. Saddam can't be bothered to meet the less important foreign visitors. The Austrian far right leader Joerg Heider for instance. He thought he was meeting the real Saddam. Dieter Buhmann shows he merely met a fake.

Buhmann: This is a picture of the double, you see a lot of differences in the anatomical areas. The corner of the left eyelid is in the wrong place. The top of the nose has another form and the ear is different and altogether you can be sure that they are two different persons.

Using the same laughable formula ("Are you absolutely certain?" + "I am absolutely sure" = True) I can now reveal that US President John F. Kennedy employed no-less than seven look-alikes, partly because of the "survival technique" (say no more) and partrly because he couldn't be arsed getting his, um, ass out of bed!

Here is my proof.

Of course this isn't true. Facial features can naturally appear somewhat distorted depending on skin, lighting condition, etc. Digital compression can also impact overall image quality.

Any professional broadcasting company surely would know this?

The many faces of Saddam Hussein

Cloud-cuckoo land, a Republican stronghold

2006-07-25T00:24:00.011Z

The US House Armed Services Committee convened June 29th to question and consider the Recent Revelation Concerning Weapons of Mass Destruction Found in Iraq. I finally diverted some of my attention to this over the weekend, and would have posted sooner, if I weren't driven to drink by the depressing nature of it all.

The committee heard from two panels of witnesses in open session over a period of some four and a half hours. A summary press release is available here, but more reliably, an audio recording of the hearing can be played back by clicking here. The written summary is misleading because one would expect it to present all the main points in a concise form. Not so. Surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly, House Republicans framed their questions throughout to ensure they got enough right answers. Taken as a whole, however, it soon becomes evident that not a single, viable weapon of mass destruction has been found in Iraq to date.

Here are a just a few of the interesting facts that didn't make it into the press release:

• These weapons were produced in the 1980s (00:14) and are of the type used during the Iran-Iraq war (01:52)
• Projectiles are badly corroded in most cases and can no longer be discharged as designed (01:27)
• They were found in a variety of locations (00:22): some had been improperly dismantled and/or destroyed (01:27), others were found abandoned on the battlefield and other unmarked munitions had been misplaced in conventional storage bunkers (03:22)
• They cannot be reconditioned (01:27)
• An unspecified number are completely empty (00:47)
• It is extraordinarily difficult, but not impossible, to drain any existing agent (03:54)

Congressman Curt Weldon argued that because Saddam Hussein failed to declare these chemical munitions, he was in breach of UN resolution 687, and others like it, and therefore the decision to attack Iraq can be entirely justified - this despite Iraqi military personnel stating convincingly that they did not know the location of these rounds, nor Saddam who himself believed, and told his cabinet members prior to the invasion, that all such weapons had been destroyed.

As such awkward facts begin to impose, Republicans on the committee appeal to some hypothetical scenario in which pre-2003 reality does not readily fit. What-if a terrorist were to acquire scores of these badly corroded munitions; what-if some terrorist had the expertise and capability to extract, without immobilising him or herself, the degraded chemical agent from within each shell; and what-if a terrorist later released the accumulated agent in a confined space, say, somewhere in the United States. Might Americans die? The answer they wanted to hear and the one they received was, "potentially . . . . yes!" However, a string of what-ifs conveniently spared Weldon and friends the impossible task of having to rationally explain why Saddam would give away inert weapons he no longer knew existed.

New American Century signatory Frank Gaffney was invited along to blather on, quite unfittingly, when the appearance of a third arms control specialist would have been more appropriate. Saddam's total control over Iraq's "immense oil resources" (a serious crime), the safe-haven that he provided for terrorists and his regime's incontestable "mastery" of chemical and biological weaponry all combined to constitute an unacceptable threat, he said, while ignoring the mountain of first-hand testimony from scientists who say few, if any, unconventional weapons programmes proceeded without some Keystone Kop type incident, or reached anything near the stage of perfect completion.

Gaffney also regurgitated the risible claim, based on a single-source, that Saddam had planned to fill aerosol perfume cans with biological agents and smuggle them onto department store shelves in the United States. He mumbled something about Osama bin Laden wanting to destroy America using magnetic pulse weapons, and said there is sound evidence that Saddam carted off his WMD to Syria and Lebanon (the Russkies also had a hand in disposing of them, obviously). No trace yet of Saddam's secret robot army, of which he made no mention.

One or two committee members were uncritically receptive to the Saddam-disappeared-his-WMD-when-he-needed-them-most theory. As noted by The New Republic, at one point during proceedings, Thelma Blake alerted all those assembled to a breaking news item, received via her BlackBerry, that suggested "Saddam's WMD might have been detonated just that morning in Israel by Palestinian terrorists."

Weldon invoked the Cooperative Threat Reduction programme, an important project which the US provides annual monetary support for, and pursued a line of argument that says if Russia's aging stockpile of sarin nerve agent is still to be considered lethal today, not having lost any of its potency, then the same must also be true of the chemical rounds recently recovered in Iraq. (02:54) When his time finally came to speak, David Kay disagreed, explaining that Iraqi sarin has been analysed many times in laboratories all around the world

[and] that sarin was of such poor quality, it lacked any stabilization agent, and quite frankly, if I can respond to an earlier question you had, Congressman Weldon, it does not in any way look like Russian sarin. The Russians, as a matter of fact, as you know, the Russians produced most of their sarin with a stolen German process and then quickly moved on to more advanced nerve agents, some of which are truly frightening and very stable. While [Iraqi sarin is] not something I would like to rub up next to, it was not going to be a major concern. (03:25)

Not bothering to fully consider his answer, Weldon tried again, asking Kay to consider how many Iranians died as a result of being struck by this "less-than-effective" nerve agent (as if he cared). The general consensus was that undoubtedly many thousands of infantrymen died, however Kay stressed for a second time that in terms of persistence, "the Iraqi stuff went bad very quickly." (03:58)

Congressman Duncan Hunter was next to make a fool of himself, asking David Kay if he knew what chemical weapon killed the Iraqi Kurds, moments before holding up a picture of the Halabja poison gas attack. He was informed that multiple chemical agents were deployed. The Congressman shares his observation that the moment this town was hit, hundreds of its inhabitants appear to have dropped down dead, mid-stride. He then wonders why, when Kay concurs, the weapon inspector would still choose to minimise the effectiveness of Saddam's chemical arsenal. Kay, clearly exasperated at this point, responds again: "The Iraqi chemical weapons were very effective if it was fresh agent. And that's why they devised this system of rapid fill, because they had to produce it and had to use it relatively quickly or it became bad. The Russians have chemical agents that are stable over generations."

Although he didn't appear before the committee, Charles Duelfer agrees, speaking here on NPR's Talk of the Nation:

Neal Conan: The report says hundreds of WMDs were found in Iraq. Does this change any of the findings in your report?

Charles Deulfer: No, the report – the findings of the report were basically to describe the relationship of the regime with weapons of mass destruction generally. You know, at two different times, Saddam elected to have and then not to have weapons of mass destruction. We found, when we were investigating, some residual chemical munitions. And we said in the report that such chemical munitions would probably still be found. But the ones which have been found are left over from the Iran-Iraq war. They are almost 20 years old, and they are in a decayed fashion. It is very interesting that there are so many that were unaccounted for, but they do not constitute a weapon of mass destruction, although they could be a local hazard.

Conan: So these – were these the weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration said that it was going into Iraq to find before the war?

Deulfer: No, these do not indicate an ongoing weapons of mass destruction program as had been thought to exist before the war. These are leftover rounds, which Iraq probably did not even know that it had. Certainly, the leadership was unaware of their existence, because they made very clear that they had gotten rid of their programs as a prelude to getting out of sanctions.

...

Deulfer: Sarin agent decays, you know, at a certain rate, as does mustard agent. What we found, both as UN and later when I was with the Iraq Survey Group, is that some of these rounds would have highly degraded agent, but it is still dangerous. You know, it can be a local hazard. If an insurgent got it and wanted to create a local hazard, it could be exploded. When I was running the ISG – the Iraq Survey Group – we had a couple of them that had been turned in to these IEDs, the improvised explosive devices. But they are local hazards. They are not a major, you know, weapon of mass destruction.

Both Kay and Terrance Taylor, also formerly of UNSCOM, agreed that such weapons continue to turn up in Europe and other parts of the world today – either as remnants from WW2 or other conflicts – and they don't expect Iraq to be any different. Unexploded munitions of all types should be in evidence along old Iran-Iraq battle lines, which often shifted rapidly, but you may have to look hard for them.

And so there you have it, from two of Bush's hand-picked weapons inspectors. These aren't viable weapons of mass destruction. Three years later and still no hidden stockpiles. Only remnants, many years old, improperly destroyed, misplaced, unexploded and abandoned. Yet some munitions remain hazardous and potentially lethal, and one might die if exposed to a sufficient quantity of degraded agent in a confined space over a prolonged period of time (so I suggest you don't try extracting the agent using an ordinary household drill.) Otherwise, people just aren't going to stick around.

Embrace

2006-05-14T01:32:00.002Z

From the ashes of disaster

2006-05-13T02:45:00.003Z

Is anyone so blind as to suppose that we shall not be needing this hard-bought experience in the future? ~ Christopher Hitchens

_

Saddam Documents (caveat emptor)

2006-04-07T23:35:00.002Z

The US Government continues to drip feed carefully selected documents and other material obtained in Iraq after the ousting of Saddam Hussein into the public domain. Republicans are pressing the government to fully open the tap, releasing all forms of exploitable media, including thousands of documents not yet translated, however the Bush administration is mindful to ensure that nothing diplomatically sensitive or politically embarrassing comes to light.

The release is currently being coordinated by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Army's Foreign Military Studies Office. Remarkably, both the ODNI press release and the FMSO web portal emphasise caution:

The US Government has made no determination regarding the authenticity of the documents, validity or factual accuracy of the information contained therein, or the quality of any translations, when available. Users who come across documents they feel are inappropriately released may contact the responsible officers...

"Viewers are urged to carefully read the disclaimer above," reads a message on the site. But why the uncertainty? Well, according to an unidentified intelligence source who spoke to Scott Shane of the New York Times, the database includes a fair amount of suspected forgeries, peddled by hustlers both before and after the war and obtained through determined Iraqi exile opposition groups.

"There was a bustling black market for forged documents in Baghdad after the war. How will we determine which documents are real and which documents are not?" asks Weekly Standard columnist Stephen Hayes. We may not know for certain and gauging by the extremely poor quality of Hayes' output over the last few years, he might not genuinely care. The AEI's Reuel Gerecht posits that the government "does not have enough competent Arabic linguists to sift through and screen all the material." It's seemingly too much that they request assistance from reliable partners at home and abroad, so Gerecht would sooner have the government release the material into the hands of incompetents instead. [1] That's basically the fear of Michael Scheuer, the 22-year CIA veteran who headed up the Bin Laden Unit: "There's no quality control. You'll have guys out there with a smattering of Arabic drawing all kinds of crazy conclusions." Yes indeed. And surely that is the point.

In his book, Against All Enemies, former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke writes: "The simple fact is that lots of people, particularly in the Middle East, pass along many rumors and they end up being recorded and filed by US intelligence agencies in raw reports. That does not make them 'intelligence'". Rather,

Intelligence involves analysis of raw reports, not merely their enumeration or weighing them by the pound. Analysis, in turn, involves finding independent means of corroborating the reports.

Did al-Qaeda agents ever talk to Iraqi agents? I would be startled if they had not. I would also be startled if American, Israeli, Iranian, British, or Jordanian agents had somehow failed to talk to al-Qaeda or Iraqi agents. Talking to each other is what intelligence agents do, often under assumed identities or "false flags," looking for information or possible defectors.

Former National Intelligence Officer Paul Pillar states that, "Iraq did provide other kinds of sponsorship to terrorist groups, some of the Palestinian groups that aren't so active anymore. ... But in terms of it having provided support or sustenance or strength, or having anything close to an alliance with al Qaeda, it simply wasn't there." [2]

US and British representatives have interviewed the captured Iraqi hierarchy (many times) and the unanimous response is that Iraq's "relationship" with "the Saudi dissident" was the same as most others regimes – a casual interest in discovering operational movement and intent. Although Saddam Hussein was occasionally willing to exploit various groups and placate moderate regime opponents by building/refurbishing a limited number of mosques, he would never be so foolish as to relinquish WMD to them (least of all people who clearly despised him) or affiliate himself with a group so unpredictable and dangerous it would bring about his own downfall. [3] The same is true of captured militants. Those closest to Osama bin Laden state categorically that there was no meaningful contact between the two. His open hostility is consistent and a matter of public record. Asked at any time what he thought of Saddam's Iraq and bin Laden would freely answer: "The land of the Arab world, the land is like a mother, and Saddam Hussein is fucking his mother." [4] He is alleged to have said that in 1997, a period Stephen Hayes wants you to believe Saddam and Osama were getting it on together.

Military interventionists consider "hatred of America" to be the underlying adhesive that bonds all rogues together, yet as political analyst Gary Gambill points out, "Colonel Muammar Qadhafi's decades-long confrontation with the West has never given him much purchase among militant Islamists in Libya." Just ask any member of the once British-backed, al-Qaeda-linked Libyan Islamic Fighting Group that repeatedly tried to assassinate him.

Unfortunately, these well-founded conclusions are not good enough for some people.

Just as moon hoax believers browse the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal in the hope of spotting an earthworm, so Saddam-9/11 conspiracy theorists read every poorly translated document, looking for one piece of killer information that will retrospectively bind the Baathists and the Bin Ladenists together, thereby vindicating President George Bush's decision to attack Iraq – something many members of his administration had long been itching to do. And if the two keep coming unstuck then many tenuous connections will make do: selective quotation, serious omission, guilt by association, insinuation, outright distortion; anything to muddy the ~~oil~~ water; anything to expose the Iraqi-al-Qaeda terror alliance that was primed to blow up in Uncle Sam's face.

They know there was a deep, dark connection just as sure as they know Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and was busy producing more. The key question, they say, is what happened to them? They'll tell you that the "missing" weapons were loaded onto cargo vessels and dispatched out to sea. Some taken to Lebanon's Bekka Valley. Syria most definitely. Some think Pakistan may be the culprit, others Russia. Still others Syria, Lebanon and Iran. The boring truth? Iraq's prohibited weapons and production related material was destroyed by a special UN commission and unilaterally by Iraq between the years 1991-98. Only remnants remained. (Independent disarmament experts deserve serious recognition, no matter what their political persuasion.)

Click on each document's identification number to see what people, almost exclusively from the right, are saying about them.

BIAP 2003-000654 "proves that not only Saddam Regime supported terrorists organization like Hamas and Al Qaeda as we have learned from other documents but also they were recruiting Suicide Terrorist Bombers to hit US interests." That is according to Joseph G. Shahda, a Lebanese-born engineer now living in the United States. Shahda translates and posts his findings to the Free Republic web site. It was an interesting morsel of information on page 6 that spiked his interest, which he translated like this:

The top secret letter 2205 of the Military Branch of Al Qadisya on 4/3/2001 announced by the top secret letter 246 from the Command of the military sector of Zi Kar on 8/3/2001 announced to us by the top secret letter 154 from the Command of Ali Military Division on 10/3/2001 we ask to provide that Division with the names of those who desire to volunteer for Suicide Mission to liberate Palestine and to strike American Interests and according what is shown below to please review and inform us.

Definite proof then, that Saddam was in contact with Bin Laden's group and looking for Iraqi volunteers to strike American interests? Er, not exactly. Al Qadisya (alternate spellings: Qadisiya, Qadisiyah, Qadisiyya, Kadisiya) is actually the name of an Iraqi province. A number of state establishments were once located there, including a large military air station. So not quite the result Joseph Shahda was scrounging for. On the other hand, Iraq most definitely supported the Palestinian cause. 'American interests' could be a signifier intending to mean the state of Israel (...to liberate Palestine and to strike Israel). Or, in the latter context, higher command might have been calling for volunteers to fire at US aircraft patroling in the 'no-fly' zones (a potential suicide mission). Saddam never dared to single out and bomb the most powerful nation on earth. He opted instead to continue providing financial assistance to Palestinian resistance fighters and their families, if killed. Sadly, most countries in the region do exactly the same and they will most likely continue doing so until Israel withdraws from the occupied territories.

CMPC-2003-001488: One document given prominence by Sarah Baxter in The Sunday Times has absolutely no value whatsoever. It's an Iraqi intelligence report on what an unidentified Afghan contact told them he overheard someone else claiming he heard a third unnamed source saying, that America believes Osama bin Laden, the Taliban and Saddam are all in cahoots, and that air strikes will surely follow. The allegation could have been picked up upon almost anywhere. It's actually a good example of circular reporting, with some in the press doing their utmost to keep the crap going around and around. I contacted Sarah Baxter suggesting that her piece should have been entitled "Single Paragraph Hints At House Of Cards". She didn't respond.

IZSP-2003-00003336 was principally misinterpreted by James Ray Robison, a former Army officer from Alabama. He was contracted to work with the Iraqi Survey Group at the Combined Media Processing Center in Qatar, though only as an administrator working alongside others to triage/gist/digitise captured documents and other related media. He is neither a linguist nor a professional intelligence analyst. Indeed, it seems Ray has been rebuked by his seniors more than once for getting ideas way above his station.

The Iraqis would frequently produce notes and pass on any intercepted information deemed to be of the slightest interest. In this case, Robison claims Iraq was actually planning to execute that which the communique distinctly records as a mixture of propaganda and scuttlebutt. Page 95-96 of the Iraqi Perspectives Project report sheds light on the true nature of the document:

One of the almost Orwellian aspects of Iraq's attempts to get ahead of and counter Coalition psyops was government monitoring and initiation of rumors. In a society that tightly controlled information, rumors and conspiracy theories often fill the void. Many rumors had operational significance and the regime did its best to monitor and control them. Found among the files of the intelligence services were official "Rumor Forms" used to track the source, analysis, and effect of new rumors. Some of the more colorful rumors tracked by the regime in late 2002 included an Iraqi scheme to mix anthrax-laced leaflets with the ones the Americans were distributing; Iraqis dressed as Americans killing Iraqi civilians for propaganda effect; Russia evacuating its citizens on the eve of war; and the families of high-ranking Ba'athists leaving the country.

Why would the Iraqi military start a rumour that US-dropped leaflets had been contaminated with anthrax? To deter people from picking up and reading them, of course. This view is further supported by Gen. Richard Myers, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who in March 2003 revealed: "The leaflets and the radio broadcasts are to try to get – if there is conflict – to keep the worst case from happening. ... Apparently [they are] having some effect because we understand the Iraqi regime tells the populace that the leaflets are coated with chemicals and are actually out there picking them up with chemical suits on...". [5] The tone of some of the other reporting clearly reflects the certitude of US-sourced propaganda, probably spread by Radio Sawa or some other US-supported entity.

Despite the obvious, Robison maintains that the anthrax plot was real. "Now tremble as you prepare to be crushed under my awesome logic and reasoning capacity!!! I will destroy you, AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!", he quips on his biography page. (Don't laugh, some people are taking his inane commentary seriously.) I visited his website under an assumed name to contest his faulty interpretation and observed that he had cropped the original translation – which already contained serious error – to further alter its meaning. A few hours later he deleted the pages that included my criticism with no explanation. Jeff Huber has more.

ISGZ-2004-019920 is a batch of communiques concerning the presence of al-Qaeda-linked members in Iraq, including what can fairly be described as the Iraqi equivalent of an All Points Bulletin, directing intelligence agents to be on the lookout for Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and one other suspect whom they had reason to believe was in the country. It's compelling evidence that there was no Zarqawi-Baathist connection other than he became a marked man, which totally undercuts what conspiracy theorist Christopher Hitchens has been hinting at for some time. As expected, some on the far right think the documents encode a sinister meaning.

ISGP-2003-00028868: This document (author unknown) is dated three weeks before the US-led invasion of Iraq and hastily recommends that the army establish a short programme to enlist, instruct and raise the physical fitness level of some of the Arab volunteers the American presence was attracting to Iraq. Regardless of whether this specific proposal was accepted, rejected or ignored, many people contend it is proof that Saddam was training in Iraq terrorists from across the Arab world and therefore justifies the entire military campaign. But such backward thinking ignores the determination of the intelligence community, which predicted with high confidence that Saddam would resort to precisely this kind of behaviour if threatened and backed into a corner.

Alas, the conspiracy theorists just can't let the issue go and are reduced to arguing backwards, speculating that what will be discovered in future will vindicate their earlier conjecture. "Proof will 'turn up' one day. Just you wait and see." In the mean time they have no credible evidence, and that's a fact.

Update #1: Readers may also be interested in the April 6th US House of Representatives Hearing on "The Iraqi Documents: A Glimpse Into the Regime of Saddam Hussein". Webcast video is available by clicking here. (Hat tip to CSloat.)

Question: Did you find any plans to invade the United States or to launch any kind of a dirty bomb or missile here?

Answer: No, Sir.

Update #2: Ray Robison objects to the passage in which I said he was still standing by his faulty interpretation of document IZSP-2003-00003336. He points out that he had in fact changed his analysis sometime earlier and amended his blog accordingly. While this is not entirely true, I do accept that I am at fault for not having paid one last visit to his site before publishing this post in order to verify that which I knew to be true at an earlier point in time, and for this I sincerely apologise. However, I reject completely the rest of his criticism, and his vindictive name-calling, which readers can observe here on the comments board or elsewhere, at Wikipedia.

Notes:

[1] Quoted, Gary Thomas, Experts Puzzled Over US Release of Captured Iraqi Documents, Voice of America, March 30, 2006.

[2] Paul R. Pillar, interview by Charlie Rose, The Charlie Rose Show, PBS, February 16, 2006. Speaking on the NPR show Fresh Air, Pillar said: "Well, what was found – and this has been the pretty consistent story all along with regard to intelligence coverage of that topic – is there were various data points that were relevant to that issue, even some encounters or meetings held years ago in Sudan, other kinds of coincidences or two different names appearing in the same place. What it all added up to in the view of the judgment – in the judgment of the intelligence analysts working those particular issues was that you had two entities, one the Saddam regime and the other al-Qaeda, that were kind of feeling each other out, trying to stay aware of what they were doing, what each other was doing, but no indication of anything that could be described as a patron-client relationship or a sponsor-client relationship or an alliance. There were some of these coincidences and contacts, but that's hardly anything out of the ordinary and not something that adds up to state sponsorship." And five days later, this time in an interview with Voice of America, Pillar added: "The main thing that happened there, particularly with reference to this issue of was there a relationship between the Saddam regime and al-Qaida, was a selective use of bits and pieces of reporting to try to build the case that in this case there was some kind of alliance without really reflecting the analytic judgment of the intelligence community that there was not."

[3] Saddam's tactical manipulation of Islamic identity had its limitations. He suppressed all religious activism inside Iraq that he could not control. When push came to shove he may have been more willing to embrace some none-Iraqi volunteers but clearly he wanted nothing to do with the likes of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or anyone else whose influence over them would likely have been stronger than his own.

[4] Osama bin Laden, interview by Hamid Mir, Daily Pakistan, March 1997. Hamid Mir explained: "He condemned Saddam Hussein in my interview. He gave such kind of abuses that it was very difficult for me to write, [calling Hussein a] socialist motherfucker. ... He also explained that Saddam Hussein is against us, and he discourages Iraqi boys to come to Afghanistan."

[5] See also Richard Whittle, "U.S. 'preparing the battlefield', Anti-Hussein messages, secret missions part of psychological warfare", The Dallas Morning News, March 10, 2003.

Saddam Tapes

2006-02-18T03:04:00.002Z

I thought I would share my condensed interpretation of one of the so-called "Saddam Tapes", since the far right clearly got here early in anticipation of some almighty explosive revelations and must now be disappointed.

Bill Tierney, former United Nations weapons inspector, was handed digital copies of the tape recordings some time ago. He says he was asked to translate them for the FBI. Experts from both CIA and DIA have already analysed copies of the tapes.

Tierney alleges that one particular recording (circa 1995) captures Saddam Hussein and Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz, discussing ways to attack America using weapons of mass destruction. On February 15, ABC News Nightline got an exclusive look at the material in advance of a longer, more personal presentation by Tierney at a non-governmental intelligence summit. Interestingly and perhaps tellingly, after Nightline checked with their own transcribers, it emerged that their interpretation, though highly interesting, differs with Tierney's.

Saddam recalls that he warned at least two western governments of the growing threat of WMD terrorism a long time before August 2 (a probable reference to his invasion of Kuwait) while Aziz is keen to refute the argument leveled against Iraq that it would be inclined to carry out such an attack on the United States, as opposed to, say, a deranged American citizen doing the same. "I mean, they don't have a logical argument", he can be heard saying. Many other governments shared a similar assessment. I am surmising that, if the general date of the recording is correct, then news of the March 1995 Tokyo underground gas attack and/or April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing may have been the precursor to the debate.

The transcript I have chosen to discuss in a little more detail is the second of the two made publicly available on the ABC News Nightline website. Perhaps because of the complexity of this issue, it has, in my view, been widely misreported. What Hussein Kamel can be heard discussing (abridged version here) is the wisdom of the decision by Iraq to withhold crucial quantitative data — not weapons as some media outlets are falsely reporting — from the UN inspection teams.

Following the cessation of hostilities in 1991, Saddam terminated Iraq's shattered and broken unconventional weapons programmes. According to Frank Cleminson, himself a former UNSCOM inspector and UNMOVIC commissioner, Iraq proceeded not only to hand over "militarily significant holdings of weapons of mass destruction to the United Nations as instructed," it also "participated effectively in a follow-on destruction process." Foolishly, Iraq simultaneously retained and destroyed large quantities of weaponry unilaterally, beyond UN supervision, all of the time downplaying the size and scope of what it had previously managed to accumulate. To make matters worse, Saddam decided not to disclose Iraq's defunct biological weapons programme in the hope that disarmament experts would miss all trace of it, pack-up their belongings, and not come back. It had worked once before when he was a strategic ally, and when inspectors weren't being pressured to turn over every stone and look under every rock. As Hans Blix recalls:

...before the [1991] Gulf War, the IAEA had a safeguard system that was constructed by august member states, and which we operated to the full satisfaction of the said august member states. (laughter)

Unfortunately for Saddam, on this occasion, visiting teams had been thoroughly briefed and they quickly ascertained that Iraq was holding back many important aspects of its inoperative programmes.

What Hussein Kamel says on the tape fits in with this analysis. They did not tell the entire truth and submitted deflated numbers to UNSCOM. The arms control specialists went about their business in a studious and legalistic way. They had identified a number of discrepancies and were not going to go away until they received a satisfactory explanation. Kamel's voice is that of a man straining to explain this to Saddam, probably in the hope he will assist more fully in accounting for every last nut and bolt — anything less would be of further hindrance and lead only to deeper suspicion.

Here is another as-yet unidentified Iraqi scientist attempting to simplify the same problem:

Right now Sir, this is a meeting of the highest leadership in our country, we did actually produce biological weapons. It's not a lie to say that we worked in this field. And the materials that came here came for this purpose, not for the medical use like we told the Special Committee. So when there's proof, you are a man of law, when there's a case in a court, and there's proof, it leads to the conclusion. So the conclusion that the Special Committee came to is correct, it's not a lie.

The conclusion said that you imported a large quantity of materials that are used for medical purposes, and at the same time they are raw materials to produce biological weapons. You said it's for medical purposes, using it for medical purposes only requires kilograms not tons. Meaning that the Ministry of Health can use 200 kilograms the entire year for examinations, but it doesn't use 37 tons.

They see two issues sir, they see some very efficient and accurate actions from us, and they see some mistakes. But when we exaggerate the mistake, they'll say: you guys are efficient and accurate, know exactly how to work a machine, you were able to establish this big military program with little resources, nobody helped you, but you want us to believe that buying 37 tons was by mistake?

[...]

How could they not know, if they wanted? There are means for knowing that. We have materials that we imported from the United States and they know their quantity. We also have materials imported from Europe and they know their quantity also.

In 2002, US Vice President Dick Cheney incorrectly alleged that Iraq only admitted to running such a bio-weapon programme after Kamel's defection. In fact, Iraq conceded once having an offensive programme shortly before he fled the country. Kamel was valuable in that he provided the location of a large stash of undeclared technical documentation.

And there is another important document, previously kept from public view, that points directly at the truth. After escaping from Iraq, Kamel informed his debriefers that, yes, the programmes had indeed been more advanced than the regime was willing to admit, but much more significantly: "I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear - were destroyed. ... You have important role in Iraq with this. You should not underestimate yourself. You are very effective in Iraq." Kamel's raw declaration was known to the Americans and British a long time before 2003.

Iraq would have been better off admitting to the true scale of its military programmes at the outset, since the inspectors ended up exposing a whole series of lies relating directly to them. The job of disarming Iraq was unnecessarily difficult, both because of Saddam's initial dishonesty and later, with the realisation that the United States had infiltrated the UNSCOM apparatus in a bid to assassinate him, his contemptuous distrust. For this second reason the Clinton administration, CIA, people like Charles Duelfer (and, yes, Bill Tierney) must all share a portion of the blame.

The executive chairman of UNSCOM, Rolf Ekeus, reported to the Security Council in 1997 that "the accumulated effect of the work that has been accomplished over six years since the ceasefire went into effect, between Iraq and the Coalition, is such that not much is unknown about Iraq's retained proscribed weapons capabilities." By the time of UNSCOM's withdrawal in 1998, all direct infrastructure was either destroyed or rendered useless by the inspectors. In a presentation at Harvard University on May 23, 2000, Ekeus said, "in all areas we have eliminated Iraq's capabilities fundamentally."

Iraq was comprehensively disarmed, which is one of the reasons we attacked it, and experts with a slightly fanatical respect for the truth knew this to be the case.

Update #1: I am affixing a link to Scott Ritter's 2002 Caltech University address here. Ritter was chief UNSCOM weapons inspector before he resigned his post. He explains the twists and turns of the disarmament process far better than I ever can. It's a passionate and compelling speech, and one I have not forgotten.

Update #2: Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) has issued an Action Alert on this topic.

Update #3: This is getting bizarre. It's now clear that Bill Tierney is a fan of Laurie Mylroie. I believe he has allowed her nonsensical writing to unduly influence his presentation. Byron York (spit) has more. Tierney's response is published here.

Pajamas Media has some unintentionally hilarious video here, here and here.

Apart from appearing emotionally unstable, his chief sin in the eyes of some neocons may have been his poor choice of platform: The Intelligence Summit. Only a few degrees separate, they have a major problem with a number of its backers - specifically those honest enough to call attention to the Bush family history of profiteering and fraternisation.

Leading neoconservative intellectuals are pushing hard for the release of captured Iraq material directly into the blogosphere, thereby allowing other associated individuals to quote by selection. FBI interest in the tapes (rumoured Iraqi terrorism) may have been stimulated by exactly the kind of rubbish Tierney is propagating. Should they have known better?

Update #4: Sherrie Gossett, a conservative oriented investigative reporter, has more information on Bill Tierney's Intelligence Summit presentation. Evidently, his interpretation of the tapes cannot be relied upon.

Evidence-based journalism, and Helen Boaden

2006-01-15T01:19:00.004Z

This is Helen Boaden, the BBC's director of news. And this is BBC defence correspondent Paul Wood. What follows is an exchange between British media analyst David Edwards and Helen Boaden, the subject being Wood's substandard performance:

December 22, 2005

Dear Helen

On tonight's BBC News at Ten, Paul Wood asserted that British and American forces "came to Iraq in the first place to bring democracy and human rights".

This is a clear example of transparent, pro-government bias. Do you stand by this statement?

Presumably the views of the Iraqi people should count in determining neutral, balanced reporting on this subject. A November 2003 poll in the Washington Post found that one per cent of Iraqis believed that the goal of the invasion was to establish democracy in Iraq (Walter Pincus, Washington Post, November 12, 2003).

Sincerely
David Edwards

January 5, 2006

Dear Mr Edwards

Paul Wood's analysis of the underlying motivation of the coalition is borne out by many speeches and remarks made by both Mr Bush and Mr Blair.

Yours sincerely
Helen Boaden
Director, BBC News

Paul Wood's analysis is accurate, Boaden states plainly; his inclination to uncritically accept elite sources of information implicitly validated. But not so fast. In order to believe that there was a hidden, benign motivation for the unprovoked attack on Iraq - to "bring" democracy and human rights (assuming the aggressor is true to these things) - one must first plan and commit to remove the old despotic regime in Baghdad. Surely it cannot have escaped Boaden's attention that the British Government studiously avoided justifying the intervention on such grounds?

In a September 2002 parliamentary debate, Blair said removing the regime "is not the purpose of our action; our purpose is to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction". In an interview with the Arabic service of Radio Monte Carlo in November 2002, he stated: "So far as our objective, it is disarmament, not regime change – that is our objective. ... I have got no doubt either that the purpose of our challenge from the United Nations is disarmament of weapons of mass destruction, it is not regime change." In his first monthly press conference of 2003, Blair told journalists, "Of course no-one wants conflict, everyone would prefer this to be resolved peacefully." At his next Downing Street press conference in February, he said: "There is no inexorable decision to go to war, but there is an inexorable decision to disarm Saddam Hussein. How that happens is up to Saddam." The same day, the Prime Minister's official spokesman explained that: "If Saddam Hussein co-operates, if he's serious about disarmament, then he can stay in power." In response to a question from Charles Kennedy, Blair insisted: "I have always said that the purpose of any action has got to be the disarmament of Iraq of weapons of mass destruction." In a question and answer session with Independent on Sunday readers, he replied, "We have gone out of our way to give Saddam another chance to disarm peacefully though this means he would stay in power." And in a statement on Iraq in the House of Commons several days later, he said: "I detest his regime - I hope most people do - but even now, he could save it by complying with the UN's demand. Even now, we are prepared to go the extra step to achieve disarmament peacefully." The motion Tony Blair put down in the House of Commons asked members to support the decision "that the United Kingdom should use all means necessary to ensure the disarmament of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction". He further told the House: "I have never put the justification for action as regime change."

Millions of people suspected, and later it was confirmed, that regime change was indeed a component of Tony Blair's policy toward the United States. (UK residents didn't have any real say if, or how, this should happen - the Lord Blair had already made up His mind, albeit privately, and His word was to be final, and all that mattered.)

It is not uncommon for political leaders to state one thing in public while fostering and pursuing unstated policy behind closed doors. That's a fairly banal observation that very few people would disagree with. But that being so, one must concede and accept that Tony Blair lied repeatedly to parliament, the nation, and to the entire world. This conclusion requires not a single leap. Rather, it is a logical reading of the public record. Yet Helen Boaden coolly disregards this undemocratic deceit and retorts by catapulting government propaganda: Bush and Blair invaded Iraq in order to spread democracy and human rights - not because a serious examination of the available evidence supports such a contention - simply because both Blair and Bush later said so!

One might reasonably compare her critical thinking skills to that of a very small child, or perhaps her behavior is less innocent and better encapsulated in something Edward Herman wrote recently:

The Bush rationale for the invasion-occupation of Iraq was the threat to US national security posed by Saddam Hussein's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda. Saddam's brutal rule was sometimes mentioned in the course of pre-invasion demonization, but liberation and democratization were barely detectable as second or third order objectives. ... The liberation and democratization objectives were brought to the fore only after it was definitively established, and could not be hidden from public view, that the primary objectives had rested on lies, and were war-marketing claims advanced by a group determined to attack and whose "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." With the collapse of those claims something more was needed, in retrospect and to justify a continuing occupation and restructuring of Iraqi society. ... But if a group that had lied its way into an aggression-occupation subsequently shifted objectives, with the Leader now claiming a new vision and aim to democratize the world, minimal honesty and intelligence would seem to demand scepticism and a careful search for real motives and objectives. To a remarkable degree the mainstream media and intellectuals eschewed any such critical examination and took the new objectives at face value. If this is so, than "all the news fit to print" is not dictated by any quest for truth but by the demands of service to the state.

And what of any underlying motivation, if not genuine democracy and human rights? The poll cited by David Edwards was conducted by Gallup for its client, the Washington Post.

Although 52% of those questioned said the United States desired to establish a pliable system of democratic government, a similar majority did not believe the US would allow the Iraqi people to fashion their own political future without undue pressure and influence from Washington. 5% of residents polled thought the US invaded Iraq to help the Iraqi people, 4% believed the purpose was to destroy weapons of mass destruction (the primary rationale given by both Mr Bush and Mr Blair), and only 1% believed it was to establish democracy. Though most residents wanted rid of Saddam Hussein, 43% percent of respondents expressed the view that coalition forces invaded to gain a strategic advantage over Iraq's enormous energy resource (the largest in the world after Saudi Arabia - just one of many undemocratic US/British-backed regimes with an appalling human rights record).

Edwards responded to the BBC's director of news:

January 5, 2006

Dear Helen

That is flatly false. When British and American forces "came to Iraq in the first place" the emphasis was entirely on disarming an alleged "serious and current threat" to the West from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Only when this claim was revealed as an indefensible fraud, did Blair and, later, Bush begin emphasising "democracy and human rights".

Even if your comments had been accurate, they would have missed the point. Wood said US-UK troops "came to Iraq in the first place to bring democracy and human rights". He did not say: 'Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair claim that US-UK forces came to Iraq in the first place to bring democracy and human rights'. Wood was presenting as truth arguments made in "many speeches and remarks made by both Mr Bush and Mr Blair". Is it the job of objective, neutral BBC journalists to take it as read that our leaders are telling the truth? Isn't that the task of propagandists?

Sincerely
David Edwards

Sinister name-calling facilitated war

2005-12-20T01:57:00.010Z

Two notorious scientists have been released from US custody in Iraq, according to a well-known White House propaganda organ (Fox News).

They are Dr. Germ and Mrs. Anthrax (British-educated Rihab Taha and US-educated Huda Ammash).

"We no longer had cause to hold them since they are no longer under investigation for crimes", a US military spokesman said.

Some members of the US Government's handpicked Damage Control Unit (Iraqi Survey Group) reportedly made several pleas to the Department of Death (Pentagon) to release the woman back in January.

In 2003, I asked Richard Sambrook, then the BBC's Director of Horsehit (news), whether he thought name-calling was wise. "I think it is reasonable to provide a short-hand" for audiences that "are more likely to remember" who people are if nicknames are "used by way of explanation", he informed me, shortly after running another story on Armless Ali (Ali Ismaeel Abbas), one of many young children who lost their entire family and both arms to a US freedom missile. (Pity not, The Daily Trivial bought Ali a Sony PlayStation 2 games console to ease his pain.)

I replied to Sambrook, asking "how long must this name calling go on, and does this rule apply universally - as it surely must - or just to our official enemies in far-off places?"

Old podgy face didn't respond.

A brief exchange with Richard Miniter

2005-12-10T02:08:00.004Z

When I was proofreading my last post, I ran across this recent CBN interview with Richard Miniter (the journalist, author and self-described "internationally recognised expert on terrorism"). Peddling his latest book, Disinformation: 22 Media Myths That Undermine the War on Terror, he gives promotion to the fiction that Iraq schooled terrorists on how to highjack aircraft in the absence of firearms:

The US military's now in control of the training facilities where they trained terrorists in various camps across Iraq. And those records show, as well detainees who have now been debriefed by US intelligence, that al-Qaeda operatives trained in those camps, including a camp called Salman Pak south of Baghdad, where they learned how to make poison gases and how to hijack airplanes without using guns.

And not for the first time. He explained to John Gibson in 2003 that one aspect of the Iraq-Al-Qaeda connection which is incontestable, "is the consistent and persistent reports from numerous sources that al Qaeda had trained its fighters in Salman Pak, the infamous training camp southwest of Baghdad where they have a Boeing 707 on the runway to practice hijackings." (The Big Story with John Gibson, Interview With Richard Miniter, Fox News, October 31, 2003)

It seems that Miniter has been "setting the media straight" ever since, um, ever since some outlets wised up and ceased listening to partisan hacks like him. That is to say, uncritical authors that pay selective attention to the facts, avoid any serious, prolonged discussion of their findings, and who prefer instead to invest their energy into promotional work.

I dropped him a line, disputing his assertion that the record supports his contention that "al-Qaeda operatives" trained in "camps across Iraq." He was kind enough to send me the following reply:

Subject: Re: Salman Pak
Date: 08 December 2005 16:11

Let me see if I got this right. Your claim that my comments are not founded in fact is drawn from a website called "your planet is doomed" and that on that website the main rebuttal witness cited is Scott Ritter, who lost his US security clearence in the early 1990s, who was financially connected to an Iraqi businessman and who was investigated on charges of soliciting sex from minors over the internet?

Meanwhile, the very web site you rely on quotes two White House reports and Clinton's CIA director, James Woolsey, saying essentially what I am saying.

Just on the evidence you cite, it would seem that I have the stronger claim. Official government reports that are not condicted by an authoratative outside source or withdrawn by the government deserve at least a presumption of credibility. Ritter, on the other hand, is simply not a credible source given his financial connections and other allegations against him. I've heard that even moveon.org has stopped citing him.

And, for what it is worth, I never said Iraq was behind 9-11, only that it has an array of connections to al Qaeda and other terror groups. Nor did I cite any testimony from Chalabi's men. It would seem that you are barking up the wrong tree.

Richard Miniter

I immediately noticed that he had missed, or had chosen to ignore, a Senate Select Committee report on the intelligence community's prewar assessments, and so in response gave him a nudge in that direction.

Subject: Re: Salman Pak
Date: 08 December 2005 17:44

Dear Mr Miniter,

Thank you for taking the time to reply.

The title of my web log is quite irrelevant. The evidence I had in mind was a report by the US Senate Committee on Intelligence, which states: "Committee staff asked both CIA and DIA analysts whether any al-Qaida operatives or other sources have confirmed Salman Pak training allegations, and the unanimous response was that none have reported knowledge of any training." [1] How do you reconcile this with the answer you gave in a CBN interview, that "records show, as well detainees who have now been debriefed by US intelligence, that al-Qaeda operatives trained in those camps, including a camp called Salman Pak south of Baghdad"? [2]

I quoted Scott Ritter (and others) to counter Charles Duelfer and two other former UN inspectors whose arguments were speculative and vague. I see you make no serious attempt to refute Ritter's extensive knowledge and expertise; rather you dismiss him by first suggesting he was out of the loop and then by poisoning the well, as if presenting unfavourable information about him (be it true or false) somehow renders everything else he says false. Simply not serious. Ritter, working with Israeli Intelligence, reviewed sensitive aerial photography of Iraq and was privy to classified information and analysis throughout the 1990s. This information was subsequently shared with British and other intelligence agencies, who he frequently had meetings with. [3]

For what it is worth, I never said you said Iraq was behind 9-11, only that the available evidence firmly contradicts your stated view.

I have tried to be fair in my blog, providing sources where possible. The US Senate report is clear on a number of points: the CIA found that at least one defector had "embellished and exaggerated" his access while other sources only repeated his information. Further, both the DIA and CIA confirmed that no detainees have reported knowledge of any training.

Because of this, I think you should withdraw your remarks.

I've heard nothing from Miniter since. Perhaps he has more important things to be getting on with, like spreading Disinformation?

We will see.

Salman-Pak + 9/11 = Pure fantasy

2005-12-08T01:03:00.039Z

"At Salman Pak we know there were Islamist terrorists training to hijack airplanes in groups of four or five with short knives. I mean, hello?" — James Woolsey

"I'm surprised that people seem to be shocked that there should be terror camps in Iraq. Like, derrrrrr!" — Charles Duelfer

Here is a simple, unscientific exercise you can perform at any time. Direct your web browser to your favourite search engine and enter "Salman Pak" into the search field. At the time of typing this, Google.com returns over 74,000 results, Alloftheweb.com 118,000 hits, and Yahoo.com around 146,000. Curiously, a majority of the highest ranking results are certain or very suggestive of a link between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and the terrorist attacks of 11 September. The results are similar if you perform a blog search. Affixing "9/11" to the search string gives you a more accurate picture of the kind of rubbish polluting cyberspace. Here is an overall sample:

» » » Saddam's Files Show Direct 9/11 Link » Son of Saddam coordinates OBL activities » The Saddam-9/11 Link Confirmed » Wolfowitz Says Saddam behind 9/11 Attacks » Clintonized CIA Quashed Best Evidence of Saddam-9/11 Link » Saddam's Fingerprints on NY Bombing » Saddam trained al-Qaida pre-9-11 » US Judge Rules Iraq Trained 9/11 Hijackers » Saddam behind first WTC attack » 9-11/Iraq Linkage? Sure. Next Question » Noose Tightens on Iraq-Sept. 11 Connection » An alliance of evil: Saddam and bin Laden » Connect the Dots . . . Saddam and Osama » New Documents Reveal Saddam Hid WMDs, Was Tied to Al Queda » Iraq supported 9/11 terrorists » » »

These results indicate at least two things: the left does not have a monopoly on conspiracy theories, and much worse, a bunch of conspiracy theorists continue to occupy the White House.

Misinformation about the Iraqi special forces training camp (part of the Salman Pak military reservation that occupied a narrow peninsula formed by a bend in the Tigris river) stems from the Iraqi National Congress (the umbrella Iraqi opposition group led by Ahmed Chalabi), and through it, the timely testimony of two Iraqi defectors, both of whom the INC introduced to sympathetic political commentators shortly after the attacks.

The first so-called defector is Abu Zeinab al-Qurairy, an alleged General in the Iraqi Intelligence Service. He was forced to flee the country after exposing the corrupt shenanigans of President Saddam Hussein's son, Uday. As reported by Vanity Fair contributing editor David Rose, al-Qurairy "crossed from Iraq to its northern neighbour, Turkey." Stuck there in a refugee camp, "his life going no-where", he eventually "made contact with Iraq's democratic opposition, the Iraqi National Congress". (Inside Saddam's Terror Regime, 21 January, 2002) The second defector - a friend of the first - is Sabah Khalifa Khodada al-Lami, a former Captain in the Iraqi Army. Khodada spent approximately six months at Salman Pak in the mid-1990s, his function chiefly administrative "such as providing food, leave of absence permissions, and ammunition."

The theme is pitifully obvious: Iraqis and non-Iraqi Arabs received advanced training at the camp in order to conduct terrorist "operations against US and British interests around the world." Both men assert that terrorists, working in small groups of "just four or five", had to practice hijacking a Boeing 707 using only simple weapons "such as knives." Al-Qurairy said "the Gulf War never ended for Saddam Hussein. He is at war with the United States."

Shortly after US authorities began investigating the anthrax attacks in New York and elsewhere, Sabah Khodada recalled a separate incident in which one area had to be cordoned off and isolated after it became "contaminated by anthrax due to mishandling."

This raised a red flag with me because i) a history was slowly emerging of a controversial Iraqi opposition group that coached and actively promoted defectors that were patently untrustworthy, ii) there was possible motive in this case, as al-Qurairy probably dare not return home until Saddam and his sons were removed from power, and iii) the two defectors are friends and their shared account - circulated shortly after 9/11, when emotions were running high - sounded altogether too convenient.

A cursory examination of Khodada's other remarks shows his readiness to repeat secondhand information. For instance, the dubious (now disproven) Mohammad Atta Iraqi Intellgence conection:

Question: To you, then, the likely suspect here is the government of Iraq and Saddam in all this terrorism...?

Sabah Khodada: I assure you, and I'm going to keep assuring you, that all these things are obvious... We saw people getting trained to hijack airplanes, to put explosives. How could anybody not think this is not done by Saddam? ... In addition to that, we heard in the news about meeting some of those hijackers with the Iraqi intelligence people in Prague, and even getting money to get trained on flying airplanes in the United States from the Iraqi intelligence.

Nevertheless, as the story gained momentum, a private global mapping company, Space Imaging Inc., released from its archives a series of photographs taken on April 25, 2000 that showed an aircraft sitting idly in the Salman Pak complex, far from any known airport.

The US government published two documents promoting reports. First the White House released the background paper Iraq: A Decade of Deception and Defiance to exploit the first 9-11 anniversary (see page 18), and in December the US State Department issued a document entitled Iraq: From Fear to Freedom which was primarily aimed at overseas audiences and translated into several languages. It states,

Iraq's involvement with terrorism is very disturbing. The testimony of defectors, supplemented by news accounts and other sources of information, points to a much more extensive and active program of terrorist training and organization - much of it based around an area south of Baghdad known as Salman Pak. ... Sabah Khodada, a captain in the Iraqi army from 1982 to 1992...confirmed numerous press reports that Salman Pak had an entire Boeing 707 jetliner that was used for training in hijacking techniques - from smuggling weapons on board to methods for overpowering the crew and terrorizing passengers into cowed submission.

Earlier, in a telephone interview with David Rose, this time for a piece headlined The Iraqi Connection that ran in The Observer, Charles Duelfer recalled visiting Salman Pak in 1995, landing by helicopter. He glimpsed the Boeing 707 "in exactly the place" described by the aforementioned defector. "The Iraqis told UNSCOM it was used by police for counter-terrorist training. Of course we automatically took out the word counter", he explained.

As far as I have been able to ascertain, "we" extends as far as Duelfer and two other former UN weapons inspectors: Raymond Zilinskas and Richard Sperzel. Although Zilinskas served briefly during 1994 with only two tours of duty to his name, that didn't stop him from venturing way outside his own area of expertise. He also told The Observer that what the Iraqis had dubbed an anti-terrorist training camp was "in fact...a terrorist training camp" (So who is terrorising America with anthrax?, 21 October, 2001). Speaking with Chris Hedges of the New York Times, Richard Sperzel was more restrained: "Many of us had our own private suspicions... We had nothing specific as evidence. Yet among ourselves we always referred to it as the terrorist training camp." (A Nation Challenged: The School; Defectors Cite Iraqi Training For Terrorism, 8 November, 2001)

Other inspectors with broad experience have known about this military complex for a considerable period of time - a number recall sighting the body of an aircraft when they first visited a suspected biological-weapons facility years earlier, in 1991. One inspector with a background in military intelligence, Scott Ritter, reviewed aerial photography and sensitive information throughout the 1990s, and he was able to establish the true history and purpose of the adjoining army camp:

Iraqi defectors have been talking lately about the training camp at Salman Pak, south of Baghdad. They say there's a Boeing aircraft there. That's not true... They say there are railroad mock-ups, bus mock-ups, buildings, and so on. These are all things you'd find in a hostage rescue training camp, which is what this camp was when it was built in the mid-1980s with British intelligence supervision. In fact, British SAS special operations forces were sent to help train the Iraqis in hostage rescue techniques. Any nation with a national airline and that is under attack from terrorists - and Iraq was, from Iran and Syria at the time - would need this capability. Iraq operated Salman Pak as a hostage rescue training facility up until 1992. In 1992, because Iraq no longer had a functioning airline, and because their railroad system was inoperative, Iraq turned the facility over to the Iraqi Intelligence service, particularly the Department of External Threats. These are documented facts coming out of multiple sources from a variety of different countries. The Department of External Threats was created to deal with Kurdistan, in particular, the infusion of Islamic fundamentalist elements from Iran into Kurdistan. So, rather than being a camp dedicated to train Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, it was a camp dedicated to train Iraq to deal with Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. And they did so. Their number one target was the Islamic Kurdish party, which later grew into Al Ansar. ... Ansar comes out of Iran and is supported by Iranians. Iraq, as part of their ongoing war against Islamic fundamentalism, created a unit specifically designed to destroy these people.

Though clearly not a Boeing of any description, upon closer inspection, experts identified the aircraft as an old Russian-built Iraqi Airlines Tupolev 154. And if that disclosure wasn't embarrassing enough, Seymour Hersh shined more light on the matter when, in his May 2002 article Selective Intelligence, he wrote:

[A] former CIA station chief and a former military intelligence analyst said that the camp near Salman Pak had been built not for terrorism training but for counter-terrorism training. In the mid-eighties, Islamic terrorists were routinely hijacking aircraft. In 1986, an Iraqi airliner was seized by pro-Iranian extremists and crashed, after a hand grenade was triggered, killing at least sixty-five people... Iraq then sought assistance from the West, and got what it wanted from Britain's MI6. The CIA offered similar training in counter-terrorism throughout the Middle East. "We were helping our allies everywhere we had a liaison," the former station chief told me.

This point seems to be underscored by the British Government's lack of concern over the camps.

Hersh also interviewed a former Bush administration intelligence official who recounted a case in which Ahmed Chalabi, working with the Pentagon, supplied a defector from Iraq who was interviewed in a foreign country by an agent from the Defense Intelligence Agency:

The agent relied on an interpreter supplied by Chalabi's people. Last summer, the DIA report, which was classified, was leaked. In a detailed account, the London Times described how the defector had trained with Al Qaeda terrorists in the late nineteen-nineties at secret camps in Iraq, how the Iraqis received instructions in the use of chemical and biological weapons, and how the defector was given a new identity and relocated. A month later, however, a team of CIA agents went to interview the man with their own interpreter. "He says, 'No, that's not what I said,' " the former intelligence official told me. "He said, 'I worked at a fedayeen camp; it wasn't Al Qaeda.' He never saw any chemical or biological training." Afterward, the former official said, "the CIA sent out a piece of paper saying that [the previous reporting] was incorrect. They put it in writing." But the CIA rebuttal, like the original report, was classified. "I remember wondering whether this one would leak and correct the earlier, invalid leak. Of course, it didn't."

The former intelligence official continued, explaining one of the reasons why he quit his job was his sense that the people around Bush "were using the intelligence from the CIA and other agencies only when it fit their agenda." If it didn't fit their theory, they weren't interested, he added. It's a now familiar and well-corroborated story.

Beyond their most basic assumptions, the two remaining defectors were unable to provide the level of detail that intelligence agencies require in order to take such allegations seriously, nor could they cite other examples of Iraqi terrorist acts against US or British interests.

The intelligence community was not impressed, contrary to the emphasis given to their tale by the White House. As the New York Times noted, American officials confirmed that they had met with Abu Zeinab al-Qurairy in Turkey, "but they had not learned all that much from him." After further investigation, the CIA concluded that the first defector "embellished and exaggerated" his access and that other sources simply repeated his information. Here is the relevant passage from page 322 of the Senate Intel Committee's 2004 Report on the US Intelligence Community's Prewar Assessments on Iraq:

Reporting about Activity at Salman Pak

[-----] The Salman Pak facility outside Baghdad was an unconventional warfare training facility used by the IIS and Saddam Hussein's Fedayeen troops to train its officers for counterterrorism operations against regime opponents. The facility contained a village mockup for urban combat training and a derelict commercial aircraft.

[...]

[-----] In Iraqi Support for Terrorism, the CIA provided additional explanation of the sources of the information, noting that, "press and sensitive reporting about al-Qa'ida activity at Salman Pak — ultimately sourced to three Iraqi defectors — surged after 11 September." The CIA determined, "that at least one of these defectors, whose story appeared in Vanity Fair magazine, had embellished and exaggerated his access." Additionally, two other sources only repeated information provided by the [----] defector, and also lacked first-hand access to the information. Committee staff asked both CIA and DIA analysts whether any al-Qaida operatives or other sources have confirmed Salman Pak training allegations, and the unanimous response was that none have reported knowledge of any training. A DIA analyst told Committee staff, "The Iraqi National Congress (INC) has been pushing information for a long time about Salman Pak and training of al-Qa'ida." [---------------------------------------------------------------------------------]

And news of Chalabi's unreliability arrived in September 2003 from Douglas Jehl, again of the New York Times, in a report headlined Agency belittles information given by Iraq defectors:

An internal assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that most of the information provided by Iraqi defectors who were made available by the Iraqi National Congress was of little or no value, according to federal officials briefed on the arrangement. In addition, several Iraqi defectors introduced to American intelligence agents by the exile organization and its leader, Ahmad Chalabi, invented or exaggerated their credentials as people with direct knowledge of the Iraqi government and its suspected unconventional weapons program, the officials said.

To his credit, David Rose confirmed to me that he looks back on his fiercely enthusiastic support for the war "with shame and disbelief." Not so all others. At the beginning of the year, I pressed syndicated columnist Jack Kelly for the basis of his allegations regarding the Boeing 707 on which terrorists from other lands could practice hijackings. "You really must learn how to do web searches. Go to Google. Type in 'Salman Pak'. There are 168,000 references to the camp", came back the reply!

Update #1: Jack Fairweather has more information on the defector named Abu Zeinab al-Qurairy (Abu Zainab al-Ghurairy). It appears this chap is a fake who assumed the identify of another. The man whose identity was stolen, the real al-Qurairy, never left Iraq.

Update #2: PBS Frontline Executive Editor Louis Wiley, Jr. responds to investigative reporter Jack Fairweather:

"Clearly, what was said in print and over the airwaves before the war does matter. The Salman Pak story is a cautionary tale for all of us who are committed to tough investigative reporting."

Soldiers of the Sea

2005-09-27T17:04:00.001Z

Two days ago, The Observer reported that a number of battle-hardened dolphins, sorry, bottle-nosed dolphins, schooled by the US military, may have been set free by Hurricane Katrina:

Armed dolphins, trained by the US military to shoot terrorists and pinpoint spies underwater, may be missing in the Gulf of Mexico...

Leo Sheridan, 72, a respected accident investigator who has worked for government and industry, said he had received intelligence from sources close to the US government's marine fisheries service confirming dolphins had escaped.

Indeed they had. Unfortunately, according to a US Department of Defense press release on the 19th, and seemingly unaware to The Observer, at least one Dolphin (Kelly) was reunited with her masters.

Some military experts argue that the "recruitment" and manipulation of dolphins has decreased in recent years, but new evidence suggests the reverse is true, with many more training programmes now being kept secret.

The Indian Navy signalled its intention to train dolphins to plant mines on enemy ships and submarines in 2002.

Sin City

2005-09-26T21:49:00.003Z

I recently sat down, poured myself a strong drink and watched Robert Rodriguez's film adaptation of Frank Miller's Sin City. Although the movie is visually bold and ultra violent, I was most struck by one particular scene near the end of the picture. Hartigan (Bruce Willis) wakes up in a hospital room and discovers Senator Roark (Powers Boothe) standing menacingly at the foot of his bed. Roark raves on about the grief Hartigan has caused before telling of his powerful reach, adding he could kill him at that very moment and people would keep quiet.

Senator Roark: Power don't come from a badge or a gun. Power comes from lying - lying big, and getting the whole damn world to play along with you. Once you've got everybody agreeing with what they know in their hearts ain't true, you've got 'em by the balls.

How interesting, I thought, as my mind wondered away from the film. The statement evoked images of the United Nations Security Council and I speculated over the number of fraudulent interventions, sanctioned by any number of people, who, for a variety of reasons, all 'played along', all endorsed the 'big lie'.

Though you may have a decent understanding of why it is some governments lie (self-interest, misguided patriotism, etc), have you considered exactly what it is that motivates other individuals and governments to not only accommodate someone else's big lie, but also to promote and/or defend it?

To this end, flak and economic punishment are very powerful tools (only the most powerful of nations can endure the latter). There must also come a tipping point when the unremitting pressure to accept the lie becomes greater than the pressure to stand up and shout Bullshit! (at which point, even if you did, you would be punctually smeared, and if on the inside, smeared and your hopes of promotion obliterated). Generally, if the lie does not interfere with what is deemed to be in your own best interest then people will often acquiesce.

With the 2003 Iraq War, a small group of powerful nations planned to oppose military action - lest UNMOVIC and the IAEA report the situation on the ground as being hopeless, in which case they were prepared to join the coalition - and consequently a large number of less powerful nations sided with and took cover behind them. In Britain, Robin Cook resigned from the government because Tony Blair was unable to secure multilateral agreement. In the House of Commons, Cook said:

I have chosen to address the House first on why I cannot support a war without international agreement or domestic support.

The present Prime Minister is the most successful leader of the Labour party in my lifetime. I hope that he will continue to be the leader of our party, and I hope that he will continue to be successful. I have no sympathy with, and I will give no comfort to, those who want to use this crisis to displace him.

I applaud the heroic efforts that the prime minister has made in trying to secure a second resolution.

Consider his logic. If wide support for the big lie is obtained, 'then I will also fall in line'. As it happened, Blair did not get the support he needed and Cook went on to pen many sensible things (presumably which he would not have done, had the "heroic" Blair succeeded in his mission).

It doesn't just apply to diplomats, political leaders and other influential talking heads. Peer pressure may also lead one to acquiesce. How many times have you betrayed yourself and nodded in agreement at something you know to be uncertain or false?