Our blogs about
America's Wars
War on Iraq
War on Drugs
War on Afghanistan
War on Columbia
War on Philippines
War on Venezuela

MORE
Matrix Masters
Blogs
World Events
Katrina's Aftermath
US News
Bush Crime Family News
Science & Health
Earth News
Free Speech
News from Africa
News from Palestine
Bill of Rights Under Attack

Support Bloggers' Rights!

Lorenzo's
Random Musings
. . . about Chaos,
Reason, and Hope

Al Jazeera (English)
    Baghdad Burning Blog (by Riverbend, an Iraqi civilian girl)
            Dahr Jamail's Blog from Baghdad
                Imad Khadduri's blog "Free Iraq" (scroll down for English version)

Iraqi Civilian Deaths ... caused by Bush's unprovoked war

 

Faulty Intelligence My Eye
(David Morris, AlterNet, February 3, 2004)
David Kay was the perfect choice to head up Bush's search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD). He was in Iraq in 1991 with the UN inspection team. He was one of the most visible and vocal believers in the existence of WMDs in Iraq. And he was one of those who thought only an invasion and occupation would allow us to find and destroy them. . . . In short, no one wanted to find WMD more than David Kay. . . . Not surprisingly, Kay first declared that "we were almost all wrong." Then he blamed the CIA, not the White House or the Pentagon or the State Department. Indeed, he insisted, "I think if anyone was abused by the intelligence it was the president of the United States." . . . Within days President Bush had called for an Independent Commission. Its charge would be limited to discovering how the intelligence community could have been so inept. The Commission will report back after the election. The newspapers are now full of stories about intelligence blunders. . . . Have we suffered from collective amnesia? . . . Have we forgotten that there were highly credible people who were telling the White House that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction? Scott Ritter, former intelligence officer and senior official in the UN's inspection team in Iraq for seven years was one such highly visible – and highly credible – critic. Back in 1991 during Operation Desert Storm, Ritter told his superiors something they not only didn't want to hear but didn't believe: that the allies had failed to destroy any Iraqi Scud missile launchers. He was later vindicated. . . . Ritter indicated that as of 1998, when the UN team was withdrawn from Iraq, 90-95 percent of its capacity to produce chemical and biological weapons had been eliminated. And there was no evidence that Iraq had nuclear weapons. . . . Ritter wasn't the only credible skeptic. Have we forgotten the repeated rebuttals of assertions by the White House of mobile and underground biological labs by Hans Blix, head of the UN inspection team in 2003? Have we forgotten the terse refutation by Mohamed El Baredi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency of the Pentagon assertion that Iraq had nuclear weapons? . . . Have we forgotten the flurry of stories in national newspapers in late 2002 and early 2003 that described how the White House and Pentagon were pressuring the CIA to come up with "intelligence" that would support their position? In March 2003 the Washington Post quoted a senior administration official with access to the latest intelligence who said, "I have seen all the stuff. I certainly have doubts." The U.S., he said, will "face significant problems in trying to find" such weapons. . . . Have we forgotten how Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld set up an intelligence unit in the Pentagon to help him undermine the CIA's cautionary intelligence reports on Iraq? . . . "Even as it prepares for war against Iraq, the Pentagon is already engaged on a second front: its war against the Central Intelligence Agency," wrote Robert Dreyfuss in the American Prospect in December 2002. Dreyfuss quotes Vincent Cannistraro, a former senior CIA official and counter-terrorism expert who describes the "tremendous pressure on (the CIA) to come up with information to support policies that have already been adopted."

posted by LoZo 8:35 PM