Bush, Iraq, and WMD: some of the old news

As I said in the previous post, the latest news about the Bush administration not only failing to disclose intelligence about the alleged "mobile weapons labs" but to affirmatively and repeatedly assert that those trailers were bio weapons labs was just par for the course. I also said that I would briefly review much of what I had already posted on this blog, so here is the review. What follows are summaries of my previous posts (with one bit of new material). The actual posts are more detailed and contain links to my sources (some of which need updating).

The NIE, generally speaking

There were two versions of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that the Bush administration used to build the case for war. The full version was 90 pages long. Although it was stacked with conclusions that Iraq had lots of WMD, the 90-page version never said that Iraq was an imminent threat to the U.S. Moreover, the 90-page version contained many caveats, qualifications, and dissenting views. However, the public never was aware of that prior to the war because the version of the NIE that was released to the public was a 25-page version which contained none of the caveats, qualifications, or dissents. The 25-page version basically declared that Iraq had lots of WMD and was an imminent threat to the U.S. And no one ever heard anyone from the administration talk about the caveats, qualifications, and dissents.

The public did not become aware of any of the caveats, qualifications, or dissents until portions of the 90-page version were declassified on July 18, 2003--almost three months after the end of major combat operations.

And here is some additional material on the NIE. On November 20, 2005, former Senator Bob Graham (and member of the Senate Intelligence Committee) had an editorial in the Washington Post about the NIE. Here are my favorite parts:

There were troubling aspects to this 90-page document. While slanted toward the conclusion that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction stored or produced at 550 sites, it contained vigorous dissents on key parts of the information, especially by the departments of State and Energy. Particular skepticism was raised about aluminum tubes that were offered as evidence Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program. As to Hussein's will to use whatever weapons he might have, the estimate indicated he would not do so unless he was first attacked.

Under questioning, Tenet added that the information in the NIE had not been independently verified by an operative responsible to the United States. In fact, no such person was inside Iraq. Most of the alleged intelligence came from Iraqi exiles or third countries, all of which had an interest in the United States' removing Hussein, by force if necessary.

The American people needed to know these reservations, and I requested that an unclassified, public version of the NIE be prepared. On Oct. 4, Tenet presented a 25-page document titled "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs." It represented an unqualified case that Hussein possessed them, avoided a discussion of whether he had the will to use them and omitted the dissenting opinions contained in the classified version.

(emphasis added).

The Air Force's position on Iraq's UAVs

UAVs are Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. The Bush administration publicly claimed that Iraq could use UAVs to attack the U.S. with chemical and biological weapons. However, it turns out that before the war the Air Force--the group with far and away the most expertise in the country on UAVs--thought that Iraq’s UAVs posed no threat to Iraq’s neighbors or the U.S. After the end of major combat operations, we obtained many of Iraq's UAVs, and guess what? Upon examination, the Air Force was right.

Some of the Air Force's conclusions were contained in one of the dissents noted in the 90-page version of the NIE (and left out in the 25-page public version), but the Air Force's report was even stronger than noted in the NIE.

The final paragraph of that post contained things applicable to many other areas:

Perhaps what is most unsettling is that, as noted in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace article, “This disclosure parallels other instances in which officials less expert in the field overruled the opinions of the most informed government intelligence experts.” Why did this happen?

The DIA and chemical weapons

The Defense Intelligence Agency issued before the war a report on Iraq's alleged chemical weapons, and that report did not come even close to supporting what the Bush administration kept saying over and over about the subject. As with the UAVs, the 90-page NIE contained a qualifier about chemical weapons, but the DIA report--completed before the NIE--went way beyond that qualifier. Here's what I wrote about the report, with the excerpts from the report in bold:

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.

And--as was the case with the UAVs--the evidence gathered after the close of major combat operations showed that there were no chemical weapons, a subject covered also in a post entitled...

The CIA admits there were no chemical weapons

The basis for this post was an article from the L.A. Times which is part stated the following:

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."

Note that this basically corroborates the DIA's pre-war report.

Conclusion--for now

The foregoing shows examples of how the Bush administration either knew or should have known that the relevant intelligence did not support the public proclamations of WMD and in some instances directly disproved them. And there are even more examples. The point here is the Bush administration knowingly and intentionally misled this nation about Iraq and WMD.