<< GLOBAL NETNEWS >>
SPECIAL ISSUE May 30 2003
Unprecedented Revelations
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1. WMD just a convenient excuse for war, admits Wolfowitz Independent,
UK May 30
2. Robin Cook: Britain must not be suckered a second time by
the White House - The British government needs to concede that we
went to war for reasons of US foreign policy and Republican Party
politics Independent, UK May 30
3. British, US claims on Iraq's WMD could be intelligence blunder
Straits Times, Singapore May 30
4. Government blames spies over war Independent, UK May 30
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1. WMD just a convenient excuse for war, admits Wolfowitz
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=410730
By David Usborne 30 May 2003
(*** SEE also from Agence France Presse - US-Bush-Iraq-weapons,
Bush insists Iraq had weapons of mass destruction as doubts grow
http://www.afp.com/english/home/ )
(*** SEE also Baghdad 'destroyed weapons before war' - Rumsfeld on
why there's still no sign of dreaded weapon, from Straits Times, Singapore
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/world/story/0,4386,191884,00.html?
)
The Bush administration focused on alleged weapons of mass destruction
as the primary justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force
because it was politically convenient, a top-level official at the
Pentagon has acknowledged.
The extraordinary admission comes in an interview with Paul Wolfowitz,
the Deputy Defence Secretary, in the July issue of the magazine Vanity
Fair.
Mr Wolfowitz also discloses that there was one justification that
was "almost unnoticed but huge". That was the prospect of the United
States
being able to withdraw all of its forces from Saudi Arabia once the
threat of Saddam had been removed. Since the taking of Baghdad, Washington
has said that it is taking its troops out of the kingdom. "Just lifting
that burden from the Saudis is itself going to the door" towards making
progress elsewhere in achieving Middle East peace, Mr Wolfowitz said.
The presence of the US military in Saudi Arabia has been one of the
main grievances of al-Qa'ida and other terrorist groups.
"For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass
destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on,"
Mr Wolfowitz tells the magazine.
The comments suggest that, even for the US administration, the logic
that was presented for going to war may have been an empty shell.
They come to light, moreover, just two days after Mr Wolfowitz's immediate
boss, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, conceded for the first
time that the arms might never be found.
The failure to find a single example of the weapons that London and
Washington said were inside Iraq only makes the embarrassment more
acute.
Voices are increasingly being raised in the US and Britain
demanding an explanation for why nothing has been found.
Most striking is the fact that these latest remarks come from Mr Wolfowitz,
recognised widely as the leader of the hawks' camp in Washington most
responsible for urging President George Bush to use military might
in Iraq. The magazine article reveals that Mr Wolfowitz was even pushing
Mr Bush to attack Iraq immediately after the 11 September attacks
in the US, instead of invading Afghanistan.
There have long been suspicions that Mr Wolfowitz has essentially
been running a shadow administration out of his Pentagon office, ensuring
that the right-wing views of himself and his followers find their
way into the practice of American foreign policy. He is best known
as the author of the policy of first-strike pre-emption in world affairs
that was adopted by Mr Bush shortly after the al-Qa'ida attacks.
In asserting that weapons of mass destruction gave a rationale for
attacking Iraq that was acceptable to everyone, Mr Wolfowitz was presumably
referring in particular to the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell.
He was the last senior member of the administration to agree to the
push earlier this year to persuade the rest of the world that removing
Saddam by force was the only remaining viable option.
The conversion of Mr Powell was on full view in the UN Security Council
in February when he made a forceful presentation of evidence that
allegedly proved that Saddam was concealing weapons of mass destruction.
Critics of the administration and of the war will now want to know
how convinced the Americans really were that the weapons existed in
Iraq to the extent that was publicly stated. Questions are also multiplying
as to the quality of the intelligence provided to the White House.
Was it simply faulty given that nothing has been found in Iraq
or was it influenced by the White House's fixation on the weapons
issue? Or were the intelligence agencies telling the White House what
it wanted to hear?
This week, Sam Nunn, a former senator, urged Congress to investigate
whether the argument for war in Iraq was based on distorted intelligence.
He raised the possibility that Mr Bush's policy against Saddam had
influenced the intelligence that indicated Baghdad had weapons of
mass destruction.
This week, the CIA and the other American intelligence agencies have
promised to conduct internal reviews of the quality of the material
they
supplied the administration on what was going on in Iraq. The heat
on the White House was only made fiercer by Mr Rumsfeld's admission
that nothing may now be found in Iraq to back up those earlier claims,
if only because the Iraqis may have got rid of any evidence before
the conflict.
"It is also possible that they decided that they would destroy them
prior to a conflict," the Defence Secretary said.
* The US military said last night that it had released a suspected
Iraqi war criminal by mistake. US Central Command said it was offering
a $25,000 (315,000) reward for the capture of Mohammed Jawad An-Neifus,
suspected of being involved in the murder of thousands of Iraqi Shia
Muslims whose remains were found at a mass grave in Mahawil, southern
Iraq, last month.
The alleged mobile weapons laboratories
As scepticism grows over the failure to find weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq, London and Washington are attempting to turn the focus of
attention to Iraq's alleged possession of mobile weapons labs.
A joint CIA and Defence Intelligence Agency report released this week
claimed that two trucks found in northern Iraq last month were mobile
labs used to develop biological weapons. The trucks were fitted with
hi-tech laboratory equipment and the report said the discovery represented
the "strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biowarfare
programme".
The design of the vehicles made them "an ingeniously simple self-contained
bioprocessing system". The report said no other purpose, for example
water purification, medical laboratory or vaccine production, would
justify such effort and expense.
But critics arenot convinced. No biological agents were found on the
trucks and experts point out that, unlike the trucks described by
Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, in a speech to the UN Security
Council, they were open sided and would therefore have left a trace
easy for weapons inspectors to detect. One former UN inspector said
that the trucks would have been a very inefficient way to produce
anthrax.
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2. Robin Cook: Britain must not be suckered a second time by
the White House.
The British government needs to concede that we went to war for reasons
of US foreign policy and Republican Party politics
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=410664
30 May 2003
Chutzpah was the word that used to be applied to people who radiated
belief in themselves without possessing any visible reason to justify
it. In the chutzpah stakes Donald Rumsfeld is way off the top of the
scale.
Before the war he told us that Saddam had "large stockpiles of chemical
and biological weapons and an active programme to develop nuclear
weapons".
After the war he explains away the failure to find any of these stockpiles
or nuclear installations on the possibility that Saddam's regime "decided
they would destroy them prior to a conflict''. You have to admire
his effrontery.
But not his logic. The least plausible explanation is that Saddam
destroyed his means of defence on the eve of an invasion. The more
plausible explanation is that he did not have any large stockpiles
of weapons of mass destruction.
We need to rescue the meaning of words from becoming a further casualty
of the Iraqi War. A weapon of mass destruction in normal speech is
a device capable of being delivered over a long distance and exterminating
a strategic target such as a capital city. Saddam had neither a long-range
missile system nor a warhead capable of mass destruction.
Laboratory stocks of biological toxins or chemical shells for use
on the battlefield do not add up to weapons of mass destruction. But
we have not yet found even any of these.
When the Cabinet discussed the dossier on Saddam's weapons of mass
destruction I argued that I found the document curiously "derivative''.
It set out what we knew about Saddam's chemical and biological arsenal
at the time of the (previous) Gulf War. It rehearsed our inability
to discover what had happened to those weapons. It then leapt to the
conclusion that Saddam must still possess all those weapons. There
was no hard intelligence of a current weapons programme that would
represent a new and compelling threat to our interests.
Nor did the dossier at any stage admit the basic scientific fact that
biological and chemical agents have a finite shelf life. Odd, since
it is a
principle understood by every chemist. Go in to your medicine cupboard
and check out the existence of an expiry date on nearly everything
you possess.
Nerve agents of good quality have a shelf life of about five years
and anthrax in liquid solution of about three years. Saddam's stocks
were not of good quality. The Pentagon itself concluded that Iraqi
chemical munitions were of such poor standard that they were produced
to a
"make-and-use'' regime under which they were usable for only a few
weeks. Even if Saddam had destroyed none of his arsenal from 1991
it would long ago have become useless.
It is inconceivable that no one in the Pentagon told Donald Rumsfeld
these home truths, or at the very least tried to tell him. So why
did he build a case for war on a false claim of Saddam's capability?
Enter stage right (far right) his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, a man of
such ferociously reactionary opinion that he has at least the advantage
to his
department of making Rumsfeld appear reasonable. He has now disclosed:
"For bureaucratic reasons we settled on weapons of mass destruction
because it was the one issue everyone could agree on.''
Wolfowitz is famously a regime-change champion. He was one of the
flock of Republican hawks who wanted a war to take over Iraq long
before 11 September. Decoded, what his remarks mean is that the Pentagon
went along with allegations of weapons of mass destruction as the
price of getting Colin Powell and the British government on board
for war. But the Pentagon probably did not believe in the case then
and certainly cannot prove it now.
Wolfowitz also let the cat out of the bag over the "huge prize" for
the Pentagon from the invasion of Iraq. It has furnished them with
an
alternative to Saudi Arabia as a base for US influence in the region.
As Donald Rumsfeld might express it, we have been suckered. Britain
was conned into a war to disarm a phantom threat in which not even
our major ally really believed. The truth is that the US chose to
attack Iraq not because it posed a threat, but because they knew it
was weak and expected its military to collapse.
It is a truth that leaves the British government in an uncomfortable
position. This week Tony Blair was pleading for everyone to show patience
and to wait for weapons to be found. There is an historic problem
with this plea. The war only took place because the coalition powers
lost patience with Hans Blix and refused his plea for a few more months
to complete his disarmament tasks.
There is also a growing problem of transatlantic politics with the
British Prime Minister's plea for more time. The US administration
wanted the war to achieve regime change and now they have got it they
do not see why they need to keep up the pretence that they fought
it to deliver disarmament. The more time passes, the greater the gulf
will widen between the obliging candour on the US side that there
never was a weapons threat and the desperate obfuscation on the British
side that we might still find one.
There is always a bigger problem in denying reality than in admitting
the truth. The time has come when the British government needs to
concede that we did not go to war because Saddam was a threat to our
national interests. We went to war for reasons of US foreign policy
and Republican domestic politics.
One advantage of such clarity is that it would help prevent us from
being suckered a second time. Which brings us to Rumsfeld's latest
sabre-rattling against Iran. It is consistent with the one-dimensional
character of the Rumsfeld world view that he talks of Iran as if it
were a single unified entity. In fact, Iran is deeply divided by a
power struggle.
On the one side, there are President Khatami and the majority of the
parliament who are reformers, reflecting the political reality that
most
Iranians consistently vote to join the modern world. On the other
hand are the conservative forces of the old Islamic revolutionaries
led by Ayatollah Khamanei, who still retains control over the security
apparatus.
When Labour took office I initiated a policy of constructive engagement
with the reformist government, which has been skilfully continued
by Jack Straw. It bore fruit for us in their renunciation of the fatwa
on Salman Rushdie and it has been helpful to them in providing credibility
as people who could build a positive relationship with the outside
world.
The blanket hostility to Iran of the Bush administration has undermined
the reformers and provided a welcome shot in the arm to the ayatollahs.
British policy on Iran makes sense in securing the advance of the
reformers, which is in the interests of ourselves and of the Iranian
people. This time we must make clear to the White House that we are
not going to subordinate Britain's interests to a US policy of confrontation.
Iran must not become the next Iraq.
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3. British, US claims on Iraq's WMD could be intelligence blunder
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/latest/story/0,4390,191953,00.html?
Straits Times, Singapore May 30
LONDON -- As fears grow that the public were misled over Iraq's alleged
weapons of mass destruction, senior politicians in London and Washington
told the British press on Friday that unprecedented intelligence blunders
could be to blame.
An unnamed senior British government minister told the left-wing Independent
daily that the failure to find weapons of mass destruction
(WMD) in Iraq would constitute 'Britain's biggest ever intelligence
failure' and would trigger an overhaul of the security services.
'This could conceivably be the greatest intelligence hoax of all time.
I doubt it, but we have to ask,' Ms Jane Harman, the senior Democrat
on the US's House Select Committee on Intelligence, told The Times.
'It was the moral justification for the war. I think the world is
owed an accounting,' she said.
'My concern is that we did not have enough good intelligence to draw
the necessary conclusions that our policy makers need to be completely
confident,' Mr Peter Goss, the Republican chairman of the select committee
told The Times.
'Wouldn't it be nice if we gave them better information to base their
judgments on?' he asked.
Their committee has written to Central Intelligence Agency director
George Tenet asking him to respond by July 1 on several key questions,
with a view to holding hearings later that month, the newspaper said.
A copy of the letter, which the Times reported it had seen, asks Mr
Tenet whether the intelligence was of sufficient quantity, quality
and
reliability, how it was analysed, and whether 'any dissenting views
were properly weighed'.
'The committee is interested in understanding how the CIA's analysis
of Iraq's linkages to terrorist groups, such as Al-Qaeda was derived,'
the letter says, according to the same source.
The right-wing Daily Telegraph said that the issue was far graver
for British Prime Minister Tony Blair than for US President George
W. Bush who presented a far wider public case for war than the British
leader did in the House of Commons.
'Blair, desperate for the support of his own party, nailed himself
firmly to the mast of WMD (weapons of mass destruction) and allowed
his spin machine to exaggerate the danger to Britain,' the newspaper
said.
British government officials, quoted in the Financial Times business
newspaper, said that British and US military planners were depending
on Saddam Hussein's regime using its weapons of mass destruction as
proof that Iraq possessed them and were not expecting to mount a wide-scale
hunt for a hidden arsenal. -- AFP
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4. Government blames spies over war http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=410741
By Paul Waugh, Deputy Political Editor 30 May 2003
A senior minister warned yesterday that the failure to find weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq would constitute "Britain's biggest ever
intelligence failure" and would trigger an overhaul of the security
services.
The minister told The Independent that the security services were
responsible for Downing Street's uncompromising stance on Saddam Hussein's
weapons. He spoke after a row erupted between politicians and the
intelligence community over the Government's justification for going
to war.
A senior intelligence official also told the BBC that Downing Street
had wanted the Government dossier outlining Saddam's capability "sexed
up" and that Downing Street included information against security
service advice.
Meanwhile, Washington dealt another devastating blow to Tony Blair,
who was visiting troops in Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz, the US Deputy Defence
Secretary, said that disarming Saddam of illegal weapons was nothing
more than a "bureaucratic reason" for war.
He told Vanity Fair magazine that members of the divided White House
cabinet pushed the issue because it was the only way they could present
a united front.
The row over weapons of mass destruction was fuelled this week when
Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, suggested that Saddam might
have destroyed his arsenal before the invasion.
While the British minister told The Independent he was confident weapons
evidence would still be found in Iraq, he admitted: "If we don't find
any weapons of mass destruction, it will be Britain's biggest ever
intelligence failure. We would have to look at the whole set-up of
how we gather intelligence in the future. It would have serious consequences.
We saw some of this stuff, but Tony saw it come across his desk virtually
every day."
In another development, Adam Ingram, the Armed Forces minister, admitted
that Mr Blair's claim that Iraq could unleash chemical or biological
weapons at 45 minutes' notice was based on uncorroborated information.
The assertion was included in Downing Street's case for war, entitled:
"Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction: the Assessment of the British
Government''.
Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary, reveals in The Independent
today that he argued that the dossier was curiously "derivative" when
it was discussed by the Cabinet. "There was no hard intelligence of
a current weapons programme that would represent a new and compelling
threat to our interests," he writes, adding that Mr Wolfowitz's comments
proved that Britain had been "suckered" into going to war.
Mr Blair faced more embarrassment as MPs demanded a full-scale inquiry
into intelligence claims that Downing Street had distorted the dossier,
published last September. In the dossier, Mr Blair warned that Saddam
was able to launch chemical or biological attacks within 45 minutes.
BBC Radio 4's Today programme quoted an unnamed "senior British official"
as saying the claim was included against the wishes of intelligence
officers, who had been ordered to "sex up" a drier draft version of
the document.
The official said: "Most people in intelligence weren't happy with
the dossier because it didn't reflect the considered view they were
putting
forward. The classic example was the statement that weapons of mass
destruction were ready for use within 45 minutes. That information
was not in the original draft. It was included in the dossier against
our wishes because it wasn't reliable. Most things in the dossier
were double source but that was single source, and we believe that
the source was wrong."
Downing Street flatly denied that pressure had been put on officers.
Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister's director of communications
and
strategy, said in Iraq yesterday: "This is totally false. There is
nothing there that was not the work of the intelligence agencies."
Mr Ingram acknowledged that the 45-minute claim was based on a single
source. He said: "That was said on the basis of security source information
... it was not corroborated ... that was one element within a comprehensive
report."
But he stressed that the security services had supported the report.
"The whole world knew what Saddam was up to in terms of weapons of
mass destruction. That's why we prosecuted that war," he said.
When questioned about the continuing controversy, Mr Blair insisted
that he had "absolutely no doubt at all" about the existence of weapons
of mass destruction. "And rather than speculating, let's wait until
we get the full report back from our people who are interviewing the
Iraqi scientists," he said. "We have already found two trailers that
both our and the American security services believe were used for
the manufacture of chemical and biological weapons."
Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman,
called for a special MPs' committee to be set up to investigate claims
that the report was amended.
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