Saturday, July 19, 2003

Welcome to Wonderland The New York Times calls the administration data on Iraq's weapons programs "sketchy", especially since 1998 when the UN inspectors left Iraq. It also recounts declarations by administration officials asserting that our intelligence was accurate and up-to-date.  This article is a must read. "Now, with the failure so far to find prohibited weapons in Iraq, American intelligence officials and senior members of the administration have acknowledged that there was little new evidence flowing into American intelligence agencies in the five years since United Nations inspectors left Iraq, creating an intelligence vacuum." The article quotes Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as recently saying ' "The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass murder," he said. "We acted because we saw the existing evidence in a new light, through the prism of our experience on Sept. 11." ' That's not the way I remember all the public pronouncements leading up to the war. That is not the way the Times remembers it either. The lead-off sentence declares: "Beginning last summer, Bush administration officials insisted that they had compelling new evidence about Iraq's prohibited weapons programs..." So it turns out the very thing the administration disparaged was a far better and more accurate source of information than any other. This most assuredly was true when inspections were re-instated in Iraq late in 2002. Maybe the adminstration feared that inspections would actually provide too much evidence against the "regime change" it so ardently wanted. I have to close with the last quote by the Times: "Intelligence doesn't necessarily mean something is true," said Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at a Pentagon news briefing after major combat ended in Iraq. "You know, it's your best estimate of the situation. It doesn't mean it's a fact. I mean, that's not what intelligence is." So I guess it means whatever you want it to mean. Alice in Wonderland couldn't have said it better. 12:11:11 PM    comment []

Always read the footnotes The White House just declassified and released 8 pages of the National Intelligence Estimate, the definitive assessment on Iraq's possible weapons of mass destruction. As the Washington Post report states, release of the excerpts "...added new complexity to the controversy over whether Bush was backed by solid intelligence..." The State Department disagreed with the majority assessment by the other agencies and the challenged their assessment. The Post quotes the report as saying: " 'Lacking persuasive evidence that Baghdad has launched a coherent effort to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program, [the State Department's intelligence office] is unwilling to speculate that such an effort began soon after the departure of UN inspectors or to project a timeline for completion of activities it does not now see happening. ' " The excerpts also showed that "... both the Energy Department, which is responsible for watching foreign nuclear programs, and the State Department disagreed with another allegation, voiced by Bush, that aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq were for a nuclear weapons program." Apparently the State Department's contrary views on iraq's purported African quest for uranium were relegated to footnotes and never read by the President or by his national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice. To quote the Post report again: "A senior administration official who briefed reporters yesterday said neither Bush nor national security adviser Condoleezza Rice read the NIE in its entirety. 'They did not read footnotes in a 90-page document,' said the official, referring to the "Annex" that contained the State Department's dissent." I do not quite know yet what conclusions to draw from all this, other than the White House pre-emptive attack on Iraq was not based upon a truly objective judgment. I would also add that if parts of the NIE report could be declassified now, why not before troops were sent to Iraq? Why did members on Congress not demand access to the information? Congress is supposed to have the exclusive prerogative to declare war. There is a reason for that. Read the Post report for yourself. 11:52:29 AM    comment []