As we know, arms-hunter extraordinaire David Kay has blamed faulty intelligence for the Bush Administration's mistaken pre-war assertions concerning Saddam Hussein's supposed stockpiles of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons (and programs for producing same). Both logical and evidentiary clues should make it fairly clear that the Bush Administration was lying then, and is lying now.

Logical Clues

If the Bush Administration truly believed that Saddam was in possession of WMD, why did it mount repeated attempts to manipulate intelligence to its desired ends?

"In my view, the expert intelligence analysts of the DIS were overruled in the preparation of the dossier in September 2002, resulting in a presentation that was misleading about Iraq's capabilities," says the head of the British Defence Intelligence Staff.

Similarly, US intelligence officials, in October of 2002, worried that, "Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA," and that, "I would just say there is not much support for that [nuclear] theory around here," and that, "The administration can say what it wants and we are expected to remain silent."

Instead there was Donald H. Rumsfeld's "Office of Special Plans", created specifically to end-run around the established intelligence agencies' work? Do we not remember (certainly the Washington Post doesn't want us to remember) when, back in the lazy days of Autumn 2002, Dubya was cheered for having "until now relied little on the Langley agency for his information on Iraq," as, "There is simply no way to reconcile what the CIA has said on the record and in leaks with the positions Bush has taken on Iraq."

If the Bush Administration truly believed that Saddam could lay an attack upon a Western city at any moment, and that only an invasion and "regime change" could eliminate this threat, why did it wait so long to attack? Dubya claims that it's because he "didn't know", before September 11, that terrorists were capable of striking on US soil. This is total horseshit. Al-Qaida's 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center would have, except for a slight placement error, killed tens of thousands of people. If nothing else, the Oklahoma City bombing demonstrated the country's continued vulnerability to terror bombings, while the millennium plot revealed the continued desire of the bin Laden-ites to carry out attacks.

If the Bush Administration truly believed that Saddam posed an imminent threat, why did Colin Powell remark, in February of 2001, that Saddam "has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors"?

If the Bush Administration truly sought war only out of concern that "the lives and the liberty of the American people" were in imminent danger from Saddam's weapons programs, then why did Paul Wolfowitz later reminisce that, "For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on."

Why did materials from Dick Cheney's March '01 Energy Task Force, obtained through an FOIA lawsuit, "contain a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries, and terminals; as well as 2 charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects; and 'Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts'"?

Why did, upon coming into "possession" of Iraq, the Bush Administration immediately begin selling off the country's resources to concerns closely connected to the Administration, while at the same time rewriting the country's economic laws, putting it "up for sale"--a violation of International Law?

If the Bush Administration was truly intent upon accurately determining the status of Saddam's WMD programs, then why did the famous "sixteen words" concerning the fabled Niger uranium purchases make their way into the 2003 State of the Union address over the objections of the CIA?

Why did Colin Powell lovingly praise as a "fine paper" a Blair Administration "dossier" that had been culled and copied nearly verbatim--spelling mistakes and all--from dated materials taken off of the Internet?

Why did the United States pinch Iraq's December '02 weapons declaration, "on grounds that Washington had the best photocopying capabilities", then return "purged" copies to the non-permanent Security Council members?

Why did the Bush Administration begin smearing the UNMOVIC inspectors even before inspections had begun?

Why did Richard Perle acknowledge that the United States would invade even if UNMOVIC returned a "clean bill of health"?

Evidentiary Clues

Hussein Kamel, one of the Bush Administration's pet Iraqi defectors, testified in 1995 that, "All weapons--biological, chemical, missile, nuclear, were destroyed."

Former weapons inspector Scott Ritter (who voted for George W. Bush) has claimed, on repeated occasions, that Iraq had been "qualitatively disarmed" by 1997. In an interview with journalist John Pilger, Ritter minced few words: "If I had to quantify Iraq's threat, in terms of 'weapons of mass destruction', the real threat is: zero. None." Then: "Does Iraq have a chemical weapons program today? No. Does Iraq have a long-range ballistic missiles program today? No. Nuclear? No. Biological? No. Is Iraq qualitatively disarmed? Yes."

Another former weapons inspector, Raymond Zalinskas, stated in 1998 that, "UNSCOM has destroyed all the chemical facilities, the chemical weapons facilities, and also all known chemical weapons. ... In the biological area, UNSCOM has destroyed the dedicated biological weapons facility at al-Hakam, plus other ones at other institutes. And as far as we know, they have no biological weapons stored up."

UNSCOM head Richard Butler stated, in July of 1998, that, "If Iraqi disarmament were a five-lap race, we would be three-quarters of the way around the fifth and final lap."

IAEA inspector Mohammed ElBaradei, a few weeks before the war, updated the Security Council on the status of Saddam's nuclear weapons programs: At this stage, the following can be stated: There is [no] indication of nuclear-related prohibited activities at any inspected sites.

Hans von Sponeck, a former UN Administrator in Iraq, traveled back to Iraq in the Summer of 2002 to independently inspect some Iraq's former WMD facilities, concluding that, "The US Department of Defense and the CIA know perfectly well that today's Iraq poses no threat to anyone in the region, let alone in the United States. To argue otherwise is dishonest," and that, "One does not need to be a specialist in weapons of mass destruction to conclude that these sites had been rendered harmless and have remained in this condition. The truly worrying fact is that the US Department of Defense has all of this information."

A longer version of this article, with citations, is online at http://feedthefish.org/blog/archives/000264.html.