WMDs, PLEASE

Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News all have big sto­ries on the so-​​far fruit­less search for Iraq’s banned weapons. And all of ‘em have juicy tales from the previously-​​behind-​​the-​​scene fights over the accu­racy of America’s WMD intel­li­gence.
U.S News:

On the evening of February 1, two dozen American offi­cials gath­ered in a spa­cious con­fer­ence room at the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Va. The time had come to make the pub­lic case for war against Iraq. For six hours that Saturday, the men and women of the Bush admin­is­tra­tion argued about what Secretary of State Colin Powell should–and should not–say at the United Nations Security Council four days later. Not all the secret intel­li­gence about Saddam Hussein’s mis­deeds, they found, stood up to close scrutiny. At one point dur­ing the rehearsal, Powell tossed sev­eral pages in the air. “I’m not read­ing this,” he declared. “This is bulls– — -.”

Time:

Several cur­rent and for­mer mil­i­tary offi­cers who saw all the rel­e­vant data through this spring charge that the Pentagon took the raw data from the CIA and con­sis­tently over­in­ter­preted the threat posed by Iraq’s stock­piles. “There was a pre­dis­po­si­tion in this Administration to assume the worst about Saddam,” a senior mil­i­tary offi­cer told TIME. This offi­cial, recently retired, was deeply involved in plan­ning the war with Iraq but left the ser­vice after con­clud­ing that the U.S. was going to war based on bum intel­li­gence. “They were inclined to see and inter­pret evi­dence a par­tic­u­lar way to sup­port a very deeply held con­vic­tion,” the offi­cer says. 

Newsweek:

As the mil­i­tary began to gear up for an inva­sion, top plan­ners at Central Command tried to get a fix from the CIA on WMD sites they could take out with bombs and mis­siles. After much bad­ger­ing, says an informed mil­i­tary source, the CIA allowed the CENTCOM plan­ners to see what the agency had on WMD sites. “It was crap,” said a CENTCOM plan­ner. The sites were “mostly old friends,” build­ings bombed by the mil­i­tary back in the 1991 gulf war, another source said. The CIA had satel­lite pho­tos of the build­ings. “What was inside the struc­tures was another mat­ter,” says the source. “We asked, ‘Well, what agents are in these build­ings? Because we need to know.’ And the answer was, ‘We dont know’,” the CENTCOM plan­ner recalled.
When the mil­i­tary vis­ited these sites after the war, they found noth­ing but rub­ble. No traces of WMD. Nor did Special Forces find any of the 20 or so Scud mis­siles, pos­si­bly tipped with chem-​​bio war­heads, that were said by the CIA to be lurk­ing some­where in the Western Desert. 

June 2nd, 2003 | Chem-Bio | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.