Korean Job Discussion Forums

[mack4289]

The idea that the available intelligence convincingly made the case that Iraq had WMDs is disputable:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/05/12/030512fa_fact?currentPage=6

"Last October, in a speech in Cincinnati, the President cited the Kamel defections as the moment when Saddam�s regime �was forced to admit that it had produced more than thirty thousand liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents. . . . This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for, and is capable of killing millions.� A couple of weeks earlier, Vice-President Cheney had declared that Hussein Kamel�s story �should serve as a reminder to all that we often learned more as the result of defections than we learned from the inspection regime itself.�

The full record of Hussein Kamel�s interview with the inspectors reveals, however, that he also said that Iraq�s stockpile of chemical and biological warheads, which were manufactured before the 1991 Gulf War, had been destroyed, in many cases in response to ongoing inspections. The interview, on August 22, 1995,was conducted by Rolf Ekeus, then the executive chairman of the U.N. inspection teams, and two of his senior associates�Nikita Smidovich and Maurizio Zifferaro. �You have an important role in Iraq,� Kamel said, according to the record, which was assembled from notes taken by Smidovich. �You should not underestimate yourself. You are very effective in Iraq.� When Smidovich noted that the U.N. teams had not found �any traces of destruction,� Kamel responded, �Yes, it was done before you came in.� He also said that Iraq had destroyed its arsenal of warheads. �We gave instructions not to produce chemical weapons,� Kamel explained later in the debriefing. �I don�t remember resumption of chemical-weapons production before the Gulf War. Maybe it was only minimal production and filling. . . . All chemical weapons were destroyed. I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons�biological, chemical, missile, nuclear�were destroyed.�

Kamel also cast doubt on the testimony of Dr. Khidhir Hamza, an Iraqi nuclear scientist who defected in 1994. Hamza settled in the United States with the help of the I.N.C. and has been a highly vocal witness concerning Iraq�s alleged nuclear ambitions. Kamel told the U.N. interviewers, however, that Hamza was �a professional liar.� He went on, �He worked with us, but he was useless and always looking for promotions. He consulted with me but could not deliver anything. . . . He was even interrogated by a team before he left and was allowed to go.

..... After his defection, Hamza became a senior fellow at the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington disarmament group, whose president, David Albright, was a former U.N. weapons inspector. In 1998, Albright told me, he and Hamza sent publishers a proposal for a book tentatively entitled �Fizzle: Iraq and the Atomic Bomb,� which described how Iraq had failed in its quest for a nuclear device. There were no takers, Albright said, and Hamza eventually �started exaggerating his experiences in Iraq.� The two men broke off contact. In 2000, Hamza published �Saddam�s Bombmaker,� a vivid account claiming that by 1991, when the Gulf War began, Iraq was far closer than had been known to the production of a nuclear weapon. Jeff Stein, a Washington journalist who collaborated on the book, told me that Hamza�s account was �absolutely on the level, allowing for the fact that any memoir puts the author at the center of events, and therefore there is some exaggeration.� James Woolsey, the former head of the C.I.A., said of Hamza, �I think highly of him and I have no reason to disbelieve the claims that he�s made. Hamza could not be reached for comment. On April 26th, according to the Times, he returned to Iraq as a member of a group of exiles designated by the Pentagon to help rebuild the country�s infrastructure. He is to be responsible for atomic energy.

.... A former Bush Administration intelligence official recalled a case in which Chalabi�s group, working with the Pentagon, produced a defector from Iraq who was interviewed overseas by an agent from the D.I.A. The agent relied on an interpreter supplied by Chalabi�s people. Last summer, the D.I.A. 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 C.I.A. 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 C.I.A. sent out a piece of paper saying that this information was incorrect. They put it in writing.� But the C.I.A. 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 went on, �One of the reasons I left was my sense that they were using the intelligence from the C.I.A. and other agencies only when it fit their agenda. They didn�t like the intelligence they were getting, and so they brought in people to write the stuff. They were so crazed and so far out and so difficult to reason with�to the point of being bizarre. Dogmatic, as if they were on a mission from God.� He added, �If it doesn�t fit their theory, they don�t want to accept it.�

.... One internal Pentagon memorandum went so far as to suggest that terrorism experts in the government and outside it had deliberately �downplayed or sought to disprove� the link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. �For many years, there has been a bias in the intelligence community� against defectors, the memorandum said. It urged that two analysts working with Shulsky be given the authority to �investigate linkages to Iraq� by having access to the �proper debriefing of key Iraqi defectors.�

A former C.I.A. task-force leader who is a consultant to the Bush Administration said that many analysts in the C.I.A. are convinced that the Chalabi group�s defector reports on weapons of mass destruction and Al Qaeda have produced little of value, but said that the agency �is not fighting it.� He said that the D.I.A. had studied the information as well. �Even the D.I.A. can�t find any value in it.� (The Pentagon, asked for comment, denied that there had been disputes between the C.I.A. and Special Plans over the validity of intelligence.)

In interviews, former C.I.A. officers and analysts described the agency as increasingly demoralized. �George knows he�s being beaten up,� one former officer said of George Tenet, the C.I.A. director. �And his analysts are terrified. George used to protect his people, but he�s been forced to do things their way.� Because the C.I.A.�s analysts are now on the defensive, �they write reports justifying their intelligence rather than saying what�s going on. The Defense Department and the Office of the Vice-President write their own pieces, based on their own ideology. We collect so much stuff that you can find anything you want.�

�They see themselves as outsiders, � a former C.I.A. expert who spent the past decade immersed in Iraqi-exile affairs said of the Special Plans people. He added, �There�s a high degree of paranoia. They�ve convinced themselves that they�re on the side of angels, and everybody else in the government is a fool.�

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-worome044497255nov04,0,718741.story


"The hearing was in response to a series of detailed reports in Rome's leftist daily newspaper La Repubblica that described Pollari as the point man in a campaign to introduce the forgeries into the bloodstream of U.S. and British intelligence. The forgeries, La Repubblica reported, were the original source of British intelligence that President George W. Bush cited in a controversial passage of his January 2003 State of the Union address.

.... According to one Italian lawmaker who briefed reporters on the four-hour closed hearing, SISMI informed Washington in January 2003 that the documents were fake. Sen. Massimo Brutti, the lawmaker and a key member of Italy's center-left opposition, said yesterday evening that SISMI had notified Washington "at about the same time as the State of the Union address," but could not say whether the warning came before or after. He retracted the statement later, telling the Reuters news agency that SISMI could not have evaluated the documents since the agency never had them in the first place.

Brutti said the documents first surfaced in October 2002, when the U.S. Embassy in Rome received the forgeries from journalists at Panorama, an Italian news weekly owned by Berlusconi. La Repubblica reported last week that Panorama got the documents from Rocco Martino, a former SISMI operative, who initially produced the forgeries from letterhead and stamps he purloined from Niger's embassy in Rome in 2000.

Brutti identified Martino on Monday as a former SISMI operative but indicated he was not active in the agency at the time the forgeries officially surfaced.

According to La Repubblica, SISMI's earliest attempts to disseminate the false documents occurred in late 2001, when forgeries personally corroborated by Pollari were sent to the CIA station chief in Rome after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"SISMI purported the truth of documents it knew to be false," prompting the CIA to dispatch former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger in 2002 on a fact-finding mission that came up empty, La Repubblica reported.

Having failed to convince the CIA, the report said, Pollari took the phony intelligence straight to the Bush administration, arranging a Washington briefing with Stephen Hadley, then deputy national security adviser. Hadley confirmed Wednesday that the meeting had occurred but denied getting fake documents from Pollari on Hussein's alleged uranium purchase. Hadley said he consulted with staff members to "refresh my memory" before reaching this conclusion.

The Pollari-Hadley meeting took place on Sept. 9, 2002, one day after The New York Times ran a front-page story by Judith Miller that quoted unnamed administration officials alleging that Iraq had sought aluminum tubes for use in uranium enrichment."

[cbclark4]

Do not ignore history.

Saddam Payed the Terrorists

The Iraqi leader's payments to the families of dead Palestinian terrorists means more trouble for Yasser Arafat, writes Paul McGeough in the West Bank.


The hall was packed and the intake of breath was audible as a special announcement was made to the war widows of the West Bank - Saddam Hussein would pay $US25,000 ($47,000) to the family of each suicide bomber as an enticement for others to volunteer for martyrdom in the name of the Palestinian people.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/03/25/1017004766310.html

cbc
The men at the top table then opened Saddam's chequebook and, as the names of 47 martyrs were called, family representatives went up to sign for cheques written in US dollars.

Those of two suicide bombers were the first to be paid the new rate of $US25,000 and those whose relatives had died in other clashes with the Israeli military were given $US10,000 each.

The $US500,000 doled out in this impoverished community yesterday means that the besieged Iraqi leader now has contributed more than $US10 million to grieving Palestinian families since the new intifada began 18 months ago.

[SuperFly]

[quote="cbclark4"]Do not ignore history.

Saddam Payed the Terrorists


Paid?