The CIA admits there were no chemical weapons

In today's LA Times, Greg Miller has an article entitled "CIA Corrects Itself on Arms." Here are the highlights:

In what may be a formal acknowledgment of the obvious, the CIA has issued a classified report revising its prewar assessments on Iraq and concluding that Baghdad abandoned its chemical weapons programs in 1991, intelligence officials familiar with the document said.

*******

The new report from the CIA, which is dated Jan. 18, retreats from the agency's prewar assertions on chemical weapons on almost every front. It concludes that "Iraq probably did not pursue chemical warfare efforts after 1991."

The report notes that its new conclusions "vary significantly" from prewar judgments "largely because of subsequent events and direct access to Iraqi officials, scientists, facilities and documents."

A note in the report describes the document as the second in a "retrospective series that addresses our post-Operation Iraqi Freedom understanding of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and delivery system programs."

Judging from this article, the CIA seems to be saying that it had no idea that there were no chemical weapons until after the war. What worries me is that the Bush administration and all its apologists will then try to bootstrap that into a claim that before the war there was no reason to think that Iraq had no chemical weapons.

Anyone making such a claim would be wrong. Back on August 12, 2004, I posted an analysis on The DIA and chemical weapons. Turns out that the DIA--the Defense Intelligence Agency--did a report before the war that indicated there were no chemical weapons or the capacity to produce them, and somehow almost none of that report made it into the NIE (National Intelligence Estimate), which was the document the Bush administration used as justification for its WMD claims. In case you do not want to read the entire post, I will repost the section on the DIA report and the conclusion to the post.

The DIA Report

This report was done by the Defense Intelligence Agency. That’s the intelligence group for the Department of Defense–you know, Donald Rumsfeld’s agency. U.S. News & World Report (yet another raging liberal rag) was among the first media to break this story in an article from the June 9, 2003 issue (keep in mind that the actual publishing date for most weekly news magazines is a week earlier than the stated dated of the issue). It turns out that in September 2002 “the Defense Intelligence Agency issued a classified assessment of Iraq's chemical weapons. It concluded: ‘There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons . . . .’” Then on June 6, 2003, this article from Bloomberg News revealed that a one page summary of the report said that there was no reliable information on “whether Iraq has--or will--establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities.”

As a result of these reports, the Pentagon, on June 7, 2003, released an unclassified excerpt of the September 2002 DIA report. In this press release found at the State Department’s website (which also contains the unclassified excerpt), the director of the DIA, Admiral Lowell Jacoby, said that the statements in the U.S. News and Bloomberg articles “was actually a single sentence lifted out of a much longer planning document.” This is correct; therefore, it is possible that those articles took those statements out of context and presented a misleading picture. Jacoby also said this about the full report: “It talks about the fact that at the time, in September 2002, we could not specifically pin down individual facilities operating as part of the weapons of mass destruction programs, specifically, the chemical warfare portion," he said, according to an unofficial transcript of the exchange with reporters. "It is not, in any way, intended to portray the fact that we had doubts that such a program existed ... was active, or ... was part of the Iraqi WMD infrastructure.”

O.K...let’s look at the excerpt from the report to see if the media just screwed this up. I’ll reproduce portions of the excerpt in bold type, and then make some comments.

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 UNSCOM (United Nations Special Commission) actions.

So it seems that most of the “large stockpiles” had been destroyed before the war.

Nevertheless, we believe Iraq retained production equipment, expertise and chemical precursors and can reconstitute a chemical warfare program...

Oh my...this sounds serious...but wait...there’s more to this sentence:

...in the absence of an international inspection regime.

Read that again. Let it sink in. The Pentagon’s own intelligence agency concluded that Iraq could have reconstituted its chemical weapons program unless there was an international inspection regime in place. Gosh, that’s a rather inconvenient conclusion, don’t you think? After all, THERE WAS AN INTERNATIONAL INSPECTION REGIME IN PLACE BEFORE THE WAR. Let’s move forward, shall we?

Iraq retains all the chemicals and equipment to produce the blister agent mustard but its ability for sustained production of G-series nerve agents and VX is constrained by its stockpile of key chemical precursors and by the destruction of all known CW production facilities during Operation Desert Storm and during subsequent UNSCOM inspections.

So the DIA concluded that Iraq could produce mustard gas. That’s not good. I can’t dispute that. But I don’t see how anyone could say mustard gas–a blister agent–compares in severity to nerve agents such as sarin and cyclosarin (which are G-series nerve agents) and VX. Read footnotes 1, 2, and 3 of the 25-page version of the NIE and see what you think. The DIA concluded Iraq lacked large quantities of the key chemical precursors for these chemical weapons AND that all known production facilities had been destroyed. Now, I know what some of you are thinking. What about all the unknown production facilities those sneaky Iraqis had built? Well, assuming that there were any, don’t you think that an international inspection regime would have found those and then destroyed them? The DIA apparently did. Perhaps this explains why the DIA also said this:

In the absence of external aid, Iraq will likely experience difficulties in producing nerve agents at the rate executed before Operation Desert Storm.

So, the DIA felt that Iraq would have trouble producing large quantities of the nerve agents unless it got help from outside Iraq. Does anybody really think that was likely to happen, especially with the U.N. inspection program ongoing?

And one last one:

Although we lack any direct information, Iraq probably possesses CW agent in chemical munitions, possibly including artillery rockets, artillery shells, aerial bombs, and ballistic missile warheads. Baghdad also probably possesses bulk chemical stockpiles, primarily containing precursors, but that also could consist of some mustard agent or stabilized VX.

Man, these certainly are strong conclusions. “We lack direct information...Iraq probably possesses...” Gee, no wonder Bush, Powell, and Rumsfeld went before the American public and declared that, without any doubt, Iraq had mass quantities of chemical weapons and the ability to produce even more mass quantities. Seriously, look at what the DIA said and then go back and look at what Bush and the Boys said. Then try to reconcile them. Even a little. C’mon, it’ll be fun.

Here again is an example of how General Franks is incorrect in asserting that every sign indicated that Iraq had weaponized WMD. As with the previous post on UAVs, I ask how could this happen? How could the NIE ignore this DIA report? Why didn’t the DIA put some sort of dissent in the NIE? Why did we not find out about this DIA report until after the end of major combat operations? As with the UAVs, this is not the time to address those questions, but, as with the post on UAVs, I will address some of what has been learned since the end of major combat operations.

*******

Conclusion

People can twist and spin all they want, but there is absolutely no question that the declarations by the Bush administration regarding WMD in general and chemical weapons in particular are not even marginally supported by the physical reality. However, there is an even more important reality here. Go back and look at what the DIA Report said. Notice when that report was made. Notice that practically nothing from that report was in the NIE. Notice that after that report was made, the Bush administration made all those statements about chemical weapons. Now realize that before we went to war, before any of those claims were made, there was evidence very much to the contrary. And that evidence pretty much matches the reality that has been found. Why was that evidence not revealed before the war? Why was it not relied upon? Why did the President and other senior officials tell us things completely contrary to that evidence?

So the CIA screwed up. The DIA did not. Remember that.