Former chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix says Bush, Blair exaggerated Iraq War Case by Reuters, ABC News, The Guardian.. 7:39am 6th Feb, 2004   February 7, 2004    "Blix Says Bush, Blair Exaggerated Iraq War Case". (Published by Reuters)    LONDON - Former chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix accused London and Washington on Sunday of exaggerating the threat of Iraqi weapons to justify waging war and said they should have been more sincere.    He said he would not accuse President Bush or Prime Minister Tony Blair of acting in bad faith as they made their arguments about the threat posed by Iraq and its alleged banned weapons. But he added: "The intention was to dramatize it just as the vendors of some merchandise are trying to exaggerate the importance of what they have.    "From politicians, our leaders in the Western world, I think we expect more than that, a bit more sincerity," Blix told BBC television. His comments will fan the flames of arguments in the United States and Britain over the reasons for ousting Saddam Hussein.    Nearly 10 months after the Iraqi leader was toppled, no biological or chemical weapons -- the reasons Blair, like Bush, gave for war -- have been found.    Prior to the war, Blair said Iraq posed a "serious and current" threat, that it had continued to produce banned weapons and that it could deploy some of them within 45 minutes. Try as he might, Blair cannot shake off troubles cause by last year's invasion of Iraq.    Last week he bowed to growing pressure and set up an inquiry into possible intelligence failings over Iraqi weapons. Bush has set up his own commission to investigate alleged flaws in the intelligence used to justify military action, as the issue climbs the political agenda in an election year there.    London and Washington went to war in March last year, after failing to secure a U.N. resolution authorizing military action and ignoring pleas from other Security Council members to give Blix's team in Iraq more time to search for weapons.    "We said that we had seen no evidence of any...weapons," Blix said. "We had, I think, issued the correct warnings. Nevertheless, they didn't take them seriously." Blix said the intelligence community had to shoulder some of the blame too.    "They clearly believed too much in what defectors said," he said. "They were relying upon defectors and much of what they got there was wrong."    U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said last year that supposed banned weapons were just one of several reasons for invading Iraq and the decision to stress the arms threat was taken for "bureaucratic" reasons in order to help justify war.    Copyright 2004 Reuters Ltd    February 6, 2004    "How Bush misled the World" by Sidney Blumenthal. (The Guardian / UK)    The United States intelligence services did not fail on Iraq - it was the Administration that failed, writes Sidney Blumenthal.    Before he departed on his quest for Saddam Hussein's fabled weapons of mass destruction last June, David Kay, chief of the Iraq Survey Group, told friends that he expected promptly to find the cause of the pre-emptive war. But on January 28, Kay appeared before the US Senate to testify that there were no WMDs. "It turns out that we were all wrong," he said. President Bush, he added helpfully, was misinformed by the whole intelligence community which, like Kay, made assumptions that turned out to be false.    Within days, Bush declared that he would, after all, appoint a commission to investigate. Kay's testimony was the catalyst for this U-turn, but only one of his claims is correct: that he was wrong. The truth is that much of the intelligence community did not fail, but presented correct assessments and warnings, that were overridden and suppressed.    On virtually every single important claim made by the Bush Administration in its case for war, there was serious dissension. Discordant views - not from individual analysts but from several intelligence agencies as a whole - were kept from the public as momentum was built for a congressional vote on the war resolution.    Precisely because of the qualms the Administration encountered, it created a rogue intelligence operation, the Office of Special Plans, located within the Pentagon and under the control of neo-conservatives. The OSP roamed outside the ordinary process, stamping its approval on stories from Iraqi exiles that the other agencies dismissed as lacking credibility, and feeding them to the President.    At the same time, constant pressure was applied to the intelligence agencies to force their compliance. In one case, a senior officer who refused to buckle under was removed.    Bruce Hardcastle was a senior officer for the Middle East for the Defence Intelligence Agency. When Bush insisted that Saddam was actively and urgently engaged in a nuclear weapons program and had renewed production of chemical weapons, the DIA reported otherwise. According to Patrick Lang, the former head of human intelligence at the CIA, Hardcastle "told (the Bush Administration) that the way they were handling evidence was wrong". The response was not simply to remove Hardcastle: "They did away with his job," Lang says. "They wanted only liaison officers... not a senior intelligence person who argued with them."    When the US State Department's bureau of intelligence and research (INR) submitted reports which did not support the Administration's case - saying, for example, that the aluminium tubes Saddam possessed were for conventional rockets, not nuclear weapons, or that mobile laboratories were not for WMDs, or that the story about Saddam seeking uranium in Niger was bogus, or that there was no link between Saddam and al-Qaeda - its analyses were shunted aside. Greg Thielman, chief of the INR at the time, told me: "Everyone in the intelligence community knew that the White House couldn't care less about any information suggesting that there were no WMDs or that the UN inspectors were very effective."    When the CIA debunked the tales about Niger uranium and the Saddam/al-Qaeda connection, its reports were ignored and direct pressure applied. In October 2002, the White House inserted mention of the uranium into a speech Bush was to deliver, but the CIA objected and it was excised. Three months later, it reappeared in his state of the union address.    Never before had any senior White House official physically intruded into the CIA's headquarters to argue with mid-level managers and analysts about unfinished work. But twice Vice-President Cheney and Lewis Libby, his chief of staff, came to offer their opinions. According to Patrick Lang: "They looked disapproving, questioned the reports and left an impression of what you're supposed to do. They would say: 'you haven't looked at the evidence'. The answer would be, those reports (from Iraqi exiles) aren't valid. The analysts would be told, 'you should look at this again'. Finally, people gave up. You learn not to contradict them."    The CIA had visitors too, according to Ray McGovern, former CIA chief for the Middle East. Newt Gingrich came, and Condoleezza Rice, and as for Cheney, "he likes the soup in the CIA cafeteria", McGovern jokes.    Meanwhile, senior intelligence officers were kept in the dark about the OSP. "I didn't know about its existence," said Thielman. "They were cherry picking intelligence and packaging it for Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld to take to the President. That's the kind of rogue operation that peer review is intended to prevent."    CIA director George Tenet, for his part, opted to become a political advocate for Bush's brief rather than a protector of the intelligence community. On the eve of the congressional debate, the agency wrote a 90-page national intelligence estimate justifying the Administration's position on WMDs and scrubbed of all dissent. Once the document was declassified after the war it became known that it contained 40 caveats - including 15 uses of "probably", all of which had been removed from the previously published version.    On February 5, 2003, Colin Powell presented evidence of WMDs before the UN. Cheney and Libby had tried to inject material from Iraqi exiles and the OSP into his presentation, but Powell rejected most of it. Yet, for the most important speech of his career, he refused to allow the presence of any analysts from his own intelligence agency.    "He didn't have anyone from INR near him," said Thielman. "Powell wanted to sell a rotten fish. He had decided there was no way to avoid war. His job was to go to war with as much legitimacy as we could scrape up."    Powell ignored INR analysts' comments on his speech. Almost every piece of evidence he unveiled turned out later to be false.    This week, when Bush announced he would appoint an investigative commission, Powell offered a limited mea culpa. He said that if only he had known the intelligence, he might not have supported an invasion. Thus he began to show carefully calibrated remorse, to distance himself from other members of the Administration. Powell also defended his UN speech, claiming "it reflected the best judgements of all of the intelligence agencies".    Powell is sensitive to the slightest political winds, especially if they might affect his reputation. If he is a bellwether, will it soon be that every man must save himself?    (Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, is the author of The Clinton Wars).    Washington. 6 February, 2004     "CIA defence of Iraq weapons intelligence" . (Published by ABC News Online. AM. Reporter: John Shovelan)    TONY EASTLEY: The Head of the CIA, George Tenet, has said that the Agency's analysts had never described Iraq as an imminent threat in the lead-up to the March invasion of Iraq. In a spirited defence of the Agency and the material it provided to President George W. Bush, Mr Tenet said the CIA did conclude that Iraq possessed some categories of illegal missiles, as well as the ability and intent to produce biological and chemical weapons. He also added that nobody had pressured the Agency about what to say. He did, however, concede the Agency had failed to penetrate Iraq's regime, and had at times relied on some wrong intelligence. From Washington, John Shovelan reports.    JOHN SHOVELAN: The CIA has taken such a pounding since its former weapons inspector, David Kay, said that "we were all wrong about Iraq's illegal weapons", that Mr Tenet was forced to mount an immediate defence.    GEORGE TENET: The question being asked about Iraq, in the starkest terms is, were we right or were we wrong? In the intelligence business you are almost never completely wrong or completely right. That applies in full to the question of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.    JOHN SHOVELAN: And while senior members of the Bush administration did use the phrase "imminent threat", Mr Tenet said it wasn't a phrase used by the Agency.    GEORGE TENET: Let me be clear. Analysts differed on several important aspects of these programs and those debates were spelled out in the estimate. They never said there was an imminent threat. Rather, they painted an objective assessment for our policy-makers of a brutal dictator who was continuing his efforts to deceive and build programs that might constantly surprise us and threaten our interests. No-one told us what to say, or how to say it.    JOHN SHOVELAN: Recently, White House officials have said they didn't describe the threat as imminent, but an examination of the rhetoric used by the administration, going back two years, showed they did, as well as a multitude of phrases equally as compelling. Phrases like "mortal threat", "urgent threat", "immediate threat", "unique threat", and the phrase chosen by the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, one year ago today when addressing the UN, that Iraq represented a "very grave threat".    Mr Tenet's former chief weapons inspector, David Kay, said the speech appeared to be saying the Agency's assessment had later been changed.    DAVID KAY: I heard that speech as saying – we were always said that it was intent, and capability, and not weapons, and it was those others who consumed our intelligence who hardened it.    JOHN SHOVELAN: Mr Kay resigned two weeks ago and his statements that Saddam Hussein's alleged banned weapons didn't exist at the time of the US invasion, have sparked an intense debate over the pre-war intelligence. But despite this week implicitly acknowledging that intelligence was wrong in setting up a commission to investigate, President Bush today maintained the war was the right thing.    GEORGE W. BUSH: Knowing what I knew then, and knowing what I know today, America did the right thing in Iraq.    JOHN SHOVELAN: Mr Tenet's stout defence today of the CIA, comes in the same week the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, told the Washington Post, if he'd known chemical and biological weapons didn't exist, it would have changed the political calculus, and he didn't know if he would have recommended going to war.    6th Feurary, 2004.    "The Threatening Record" (TomPaine.com)    (By David Sirota, Christy Harvey and Judd Legum - Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan research and educational institute).    In a major speech this morning addressing the failure to find WMD in Iraq, CIA Director George Tenet said the intelligence community never told the White House that Iraq was an imminent threat to America—a stunning blow to the White House, considering its repeated and unequivocal claims that war was necessary because Iraq was an "imminent," "immediate," "urgent" and "mortal" threat.    Tenet's speech follows an interview last night on "60 Minutes II" with the State Department's top intelligence officer, Greg Theilmann, who said, "The main problem [before the war] was that the senior administration officials have what I call faith-based intelligence. They knew what they wanted the intelligence to show...They were really blind and deaf to any kind of countervailing information the intelligence community would produce. I would assign some blame to the intelligence community and most of the blame to the senior administration officials."    Tenet's remarks are consistent with the intelligence community's repeated warnings to the White House that the president's WMD case for war was weak. Not only did the intelligence community not say Iraq was an imminent threat, but in many instances they acknowledged they had no hard evidence about Iraq's WMD at all. Consider this: In 1997, the International Atomic Energy Agency verified there were "no indications" that Iraq was able to produce nuclear weapons or had "clandestinely acquired such material." The Defense Intelligence Agency told the White House in September 2002, that there was "no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons" and said, "a substantial amount of Iraq's chemical warfare agents, precursors, munitions, and production equipment were destroyed between 1991 and 1998 as a result of Operation Desert Storm and UN actions."    The State Department's intelligence agency warned the White House against the WMD claims in October 2002, saying, "The activities we have detected do not ... add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquiring nuclear weapons." And just this week, Newsweek exclusively reported, two separate government panels—including one chaired by Donald Rumsfeld—reported before the war that assertions about Iraq's WMD "were based on suspicions, not hard data." The panels "got access to CIA materials" and concluded that the "absence of hard evidence was so striking" that they specifically developed a "Wizard of Oz theory: that the whole Iraq WMD program was smoke-and-mirrors, and Saddam was just a little guy behind a curtain."    Here’s a list of the White House’s warnings:    * "There's no question that Iraq was a threat to the people of the United States."    White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan, 8/26/03    * "We ended the threat from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction."    President Bush, 7/17/03    * Iraq was "the most dangerous threat of our time."    White House spokesman Scott McClellan, 7/17/03    * "Saddam Hussein is no longer a threat to the United States because we removed him, but he was a threat...He was a threat. He's not a threat now."    President Bush, 7/2/03    * "Absolutely."    White House spokesman Ari Fleischer answering whether Iraq was an "imminent threat," 5/7/03    * "We gave our word that the threat from Iraq would be ended."    President Bush 4/24/03    * "The threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction will be removed."    Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 3/25/03    * "It is only a matter of time before the Iraqi regime is destroyed and its threat to the region and the world is ended."    Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke, 3/22/03    * "The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder."    President Bush, 3/19/03    * "The dictator of Iraq and his weapons of mass destruction are a threat to the security of free nations."    President Bush, 3/16/03    * "This is about imminent threat."    White House spokesman Scott McClellan, 2/10/03    * Iraq is "a serious threat to our country, to our friends and to our allies."    Vice President Dick Cheney, 1/31/03    * Iraq poses "terrible threats to the civilized world."    Vice President Dick Cheney, 1/30/03    * Iraq "threatens the United States of America."    Vice President Cheney, 1/30/03    * "Iraq poses a serious and mounting threat to our country. His regime has the design for a nuclear weapon, was working on several different methods of enriching uranium, and recently was discovered seeking significant quantities of uranium from Africa."    Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 1/29/03    * "Well, of course he is."    White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett, responding to the question "is Saddam an imminent threat to U.S. interests, either in that part of the world or to Americans right here at home?" 1/26/03    * "Saddam Hussein possesses chemical and biological weapons. Iraq poses a threat to the security of our people and to the stability of the world that is distinct from any other. It's a danger to its neighbors, to the United States, to the Middle East and to the international peace and stability. It's a danger we cannot ignore. Iraq and North Korea are both repressive dictatorships to be sure and both pose threats. But Iraq is unique. In both word and deed, Iraq has demonstrated that it is seeking the means to strike the United States and our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction."    Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 1/20/03    * "The Iraqi regime is a threat to any American. ... Iraq is a threat, a real threat."    President Bush, 1/3/03    * "The world is also uniting to answer the unique and urgent threat posed by Iraq whose dictator has already used weapons of mass destruction to kill thousands."    President Bush, 11/23/02    * "I would look you in the eye and I would say, go back before September 11 and ask yourself this question: Was the attack that took place on September 11 an imminent threat the month before or two months before or three months before or six months before? When did the attack on September 11 become an imminent threat? Now, transport yourself forward a year, two years or a week or a month...So the question is, when is it such an immediate threat that you must do something?"    Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 11/14/02    * "Saddam Hussein is a threat to America."    President Bush, 11/3/02    * "I see a significant threat to the security of the United States in Iraq."    President Bush, 11/1/02    * "There is real threat, in my judgment, a real and dangerous threat to American in Iraq in the form of Saddam Hussein."    President Bush, 10/28/02    * "The Iraqi regime is a serious and growing threat to peace."    President Bush, 10/16/02    * "There are many dangers in the world, the threat from Iraq stands alone because it gathers the most serious dangers of our age in one place. Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists."    President Bush, 10/7/02    * "The Iraqi regime is a threat of unique urgency."    President Bush, 10/2/02    * "There's a grave threat in Iraq. There just is."    President Bush, 10/2/02    * "This man poses a much graver threat than anybody could have possibly imagined."    President Bush, 9/26/02    * "No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq."    Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 9/19/02    * "Some have argued that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent—that Saddam is at least 5-7 years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain. And we should be just as concerned about the immediate threat from biological weapons. Iraq has these weapons."    Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 9/18/02    * "Iraq is busy enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents, and they continue to pursue an aggressive nuclear weapons program. These are offensive weapons for the purpose of inflicting death on a massive scale, developed so that Saddam Hussein can hold the threat over the head of any one he chooses. What we must not do in the face of this mortal threat is to give in to wishful thinking or to willful blindness."    Vice President Dick Cheney, 8/29/04
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