I am surprised that you are asking that, since this is known worldwide.
KS
"Since early 2004, when the David Kay report offered the initial
findings of the Iraq Survey Group, various government investigations
have confirmed that Iraq simply was not a threat to the United
States." Nor to anybody else.
And this: "The latest WMD report merely confirms what anti-war
activists were claiming all along -- way before the invasion of
Iraq." Right - check the Biofuel list archives, eg.
See also:
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0401-33.htm
Published on Friday, April 1, 2005 by David Corn
WMD Commission Continues the Stonewall for Bush
----
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/21687/
We Told You So
By Rahul Mahajan, AlterNet. Posted April 6, 2005.
The latest WMD report merely confirms what anti-war activists were
claiming all along -- way before the invasion of Iraq.
Last week, the "Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the
United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction" issued what may
be the last in a series of in-depth reports by U.S. government on the
"intelligence failures" surrounding the invasion of Iraq.
Wade through the close to 3,000 pages of these reports and one
conclusion is inescapable: those of us who opposed the invasion of
Iraq were right on every count.
We knew that the Bush administration's case of war was no more than a
mish-mash of evasion, misdirection, and outright lies -- and we
didn't need the vast resources of these investigative commissions to
figure it out. The evidence - be it in the form of intelligence
leaks, news reporting (though less often in the U.S. and rarely on
the front page), or congressional testimony -- was out in the open
for all to see.
The al Qaeda Connection
In the lead up to the war, Bush administration officials constantly
insinuated a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, and even
the 9/11 attacks. Vice President Cheney, over and again, referred to
a cock-and-bull story about a Prague meeting between Mohammed Atta
and the Iraqi intelligence. The Atta story was debunked in The New
York Times as early as October 2002 - more than four months before
the invasion.
The other "damning" piece of evidence of this al Qaeda connection was
a sighting of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Baghdad. As it turns out, the
only person who helped out Zarqawi was George Bush. By eliminating
Saddam, the U.S. has created a power vacuum that has made Zarqawi a
major player in post-war Iraq. There was never any evidence emerged
that he was getting resources, assistance, or cover from the old
regime. The 9/11 commission later confirmed that there was absolutely
no evidence linking Iraq to al Qaeda.
The N-Bomb Scare
Starting in August 2002, Dick Cheney and others raised the specter of
Iraq armed with a nuclear bomb, ready to take out New York or
Atlanta. On March 16, 2003, Cheney even said, of Saddam, "We believe
he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."
According to the WMD Commission report, the CIA believed that Iraq
had reconstituted its nuclear weapon program - which is still quite
different from actually having nuclear weapons. But even this
modified judgment was based on controversial evidence, such as the
presence of a certain kind of aluminum tubes. As news reports before
the invasion show, intelligence analysts were split over these tubes;
where the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency thought they were
designed to serve as uranium-enrichment centrifuges, the State
Department and the Department of Energy were convinced they were
conventional artillery shells.
The latter were right, but we didn't need to wait for the WMD report
to tell us that. The International Atomic Energy Association's
Mohammed el Baradei told The Washington Post exactly that in January,
2003: "It may be technically possible that the tubes could be used to
enrich uranium, but you would have to believe that Iraq deliberately
ordered the wrong stock and intended to spend a great deal of time
and money reworking each piece." He repeated his assessments with
even greater force in a report to the U.N. on March 7 - two weeks
before the invasion.
There is, of course, also the now long-debunked claim made by
President Bush in his January, 2003 State of Union speech - the claim
that Iraq had been trying to buy uranium from Niger.
In February 2003, IAEA inspectors - having finally gained access to
the Niger documents - pointed out that they were very crude
forgeries, a fact that was covered in some newspapers, including the
Chicago Tribune, well before the war. The Bush administration did
not, however, abandon its claim until six months later, when former
Ambassador Joe Wilson revealed that the administration knew there was
no evidence of any attempt to buy uranium a full year before the Bush
speech.
What WMDs?
As the WMD commission report reveals, when it came to Saddam's
much-touted biological weapons program, the Bush administration
relied entirely on "evidence" provided by an Iraqi defector
code-named "Curveball." He provided over 100 detailed reports,
claiming, for example, that Iraq had mobile biological weapons
laboratories.
Opponents of the war repeatedly challenged these claims, pointing out
that such labs if they existed would be unbelievably dangerous.
Moreover, there was no evidence of their existence since U.N.
inspectors on the ground found little proof to back his assertions.
At the time, Curveball's German handlers warned U.S. intelligence
analysts that he was unreliable and most likely an outright liar. He
even showed up drunk for a meeting. Although several reports of his
unreliability were sent up the chain of command, the administration
continued to treat his pronouncements as gospel.
The Bush administration's claims about Iraq's biological warfare
capabilities also reveal that the errors surrounding the decision to
invade Iraq entailed not just "faulty intelligence," but outright
deception. How else to characterize Bush's claim on Oct. 7, 2002,
that Saddam was planning to "target" the United States with his
vaunted "unmanned aerial vehicles? As his own Air Force experts had
pointed out at the time, these vehicles only had a limited range of
which had a claimed range of only 400 miles and were not even big
enough to carry such a payload.
Name the Elephant
For the most part, the latest report does not tell us anything we did
not already know. Since early 2004, when the David Kay report offered
the initial findings of the Iraq Survey Group, various government
investigations have confirmed that Iraq simply was not a threat to
the United States. There was the Senate Intelligence Committee and
the 9/11 Commission reports issued in July, followed in October by
the Duelfer report that summed up the final conclusions of the Iraq
Survey Group.
Yet none of these reports - including this latest version - is
willing to acknowledge the proverbial elephant in the debate over
Iraq, i.e. the complicity of the Bush administration in creating this
so-called "intelligence failure." The WMD Commission concludes that
intelligence analysts found what they wanted to find rather than
being guided by the facts. But it carefully makes a point of any
wrongdoing on the part of the administration: "The analysts who
worked Iraqi weapons issues universally agreed that in no instance
did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their
analytical judgments."
Similarly, the commission reserves particularly harsh criticism for
the way the president's "Daily Brief" is prepared, characterizing
them as "more alarmist and less nuanced" than longer reports, such as
the famously flawed October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate.
Their "attention-grabbing headlines and drumbeat of repetition"
supposedly gave top officials the impression that dramatic claims
were much better sourced and heavily corroborated than, in fact, they
were.
The commission clearly does its best to lend credence to the Bush
White House's self-serving rationale: a scaremongering intelligence
community stampeded the administration into war. How odd that a
president who went on vacation when confronted with an earlier such
"attention-grabbing headline" in an Aug. 6, 2001 PDB -- "Bin Laden
Determined to Attack in U.S." -- should be so easily scared.
Those of us who knew better in opposing the invasion of Iraq know
better now. We know that "intelligence failure" is just a neat
rhetorical device to shift the blame from the coterie of top
officials who deliberately deceived us into a war to the intelligence
agencies who were pressured to come up with those lies. The WMD
commission was not created to help us arrive at the truth, but to
head off any chance of a serious investigation into the
administration's wrongdoings.
So in the end, the commission did its job well. It's unfortunate that
its job was a political cover-up.
Rahul Mahajan is publisher of the blog Empire Notes. He has been to
occupied Iraq twice and reported from Fallujah during the April 2004
siege. His most recent book is Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in
Iraq and Beyond. He can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Behalf Of Keith Addison
Sent: Tuesday, April 05, 2005 2:13 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: RE: [Biofuel] Re: The Energy Crunch To Come(Finally an eye is
opening)
And whose eye might that be Klaus? Not yours, I don't think.
>Keith,
>
>You are not right by saying that he did not threaten anybody. You needed to
>be there just for half a day and you would have seen what I am talking
>about. People being killed by his regime <--- not sure how to spell this
>one. Over the years thousands of people. That is what I am talking about.
So
>there have been many other reasons why it is good that he is no longer in
>this possition. Let us not just boil everything down to oil or WMD.
>
>KS
Uh-huh. And more than 100,000 Iraqis killed in the doing, with more
Iraqi children starving now than before the Great Liberation (NOT!),
and so on and on and on. That last is quite an achievement,
consdering the half million children killed by the sanctions before
the invasion.
You fancy heroic surgery, do you Klaus? The operation was successful,
though the patient died?
I mean, good grief, you actually believe this has anything to do with
Saddam Hussein being a threat? Eyes opening? Are you kidding? Your
eyes seem to be wide shut.
Why would the US - Washington - bother about some tin-pot dictator
who allegedly murdered his people? They've supported, aided and
abetted dozens and scores of them in the past, who've killed a lot
more people than that.
As I said before in this thread, check out William Blum:
http://infoarchive.net/sgroup/BIOFUEL/41438/
An Interview with William Blum - The Granma Moses of Radical Writing
http://members.aol.com/superogue/homepage.htm
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, by William Blum
http://members.aol.com/bblum6/American_holocaust.htm
Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II,
by William Blum
http://members.aol.com/bblum6/American_holocaust.htm
The American Holocaust
If you're not prepared to do that, and acknowledge it, and THEN
explain how Saddam's domestic misdeeds explain all and show what you
call the big picture, then do not claim that your eyes are open,
because that will show that not only are they shut but that it's
wilful.
Keith
>-----Original Message-----
>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Behalf Of Keith Addison
>Sent: Tuesday, April 05, 2005 7:51 AM
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Subject: RE: [Biofuel] Re: The Energy Crunch To Come(Finally an eye is
>opening)
>
>
> >This is great ... finally we are making sense. The WMD is not the issue.
> >This is what I have said all along. People miss the big picture. Suddam
> >Hussein was the weapon of mass destruction. 100% agreed.
> >KS
>
>Sigh...
>
>I suppose one man's sense is another man's idiocy, and to each his
>own and all that, all jolly good and well... But in fact it's a
>matter of what you support, what you go along with, what you accept
>wihout questioning, what you oppose, to whose benefit and at whose
>expense.
>
>Which, I'm afraid, makes this idiocy, not sense. Lethal idiocy,
>furthermore, with its hands drenched in blood.
>
>Saddam threatened nobody, certainly not the US.
>
>Keith
>
>
> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >Behalf Of Henri Naths
> >Sent: Thursday, March 31, 2005 9:56 PM
> >To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Re: The Energy Crunch To Come
> >
> >
> >
> >Hakan,
> > I would like to give a humble option here,
> > ( Hakan wrote;...Criminal, established by the fact that we now know
that
> >Iraq were no WMD threat to US. )
> >We took out Hitler for the same reason, Him and Suddam Hussein were
weapons
> >of mass destruction.
> >H.
> >
> >
> >
> >----- Original Message -----
> >From: "Hakan Falk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> >To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> >Sent: 31 March, 2005 7:29 PM
> >Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Re: The Energy Crunch To Come
> >
> >
> > >
> > > Bob,
> > >
> > > You were right and I am wrong and I am glad that I did get
> > > a very good explanation on how Hubbert could be so right.
> > >
> > > It also explains why president Carter was so genuinely
> > > worried, when he developed his energy plan. He had the
> > > foresight to realize that Hubbert was right.
> > >
> > > It also explains why we see the surge in the genuine hate
> > > of Americans. It is the cost of aggressive and egoistic foreign
> > > policies, that resulted in about 10 more years of artificially
> > > low oil prices.
> > >
> > > All of this, ending up in an almost criminal behavior by the
> > > Bush administration. I say almost, because I do not want
> > > to be too "crude". The legal aspect of being criminal, is very
> > > clearly established, Criminal, established by the fact that we
> > > now know that Iraq were no WMD threat to US. By laying
> > > the responsibility at the feet of faulty "US intelligence
> > > community", the Bush administration is trying deliberately
> > > to avoid their legal responsibility. A kind of reversed side
> > > of the well known argument "it was not my fault, I was
> > > ordered to do it". LOL
> > >
> > > All of this supported by the America people, in a reelection
> > > of president Bush. I hear the false argument that only 48%
> > > voted him in office. This argument is poor mathematics, I
> > > cannot get to this result, when Bush won with a more than
> > > 3 million of the populous American vote. It was the first
> > > election of Bush, that he did not have a populous majority
> > > and he was put in office by the Courts.
> > >
> > > Hakan
> > >
> > >
> > > At 11:16 PM 3/31/2005, you wrote:
> > >>All I know is what I read in the brief biography. (and what I recall
>from
> > >>hearing about his work many years ago)
> > >>
> > >>Hakan Falk wrote:
> > >>>Bob,
> > >>>I stand corrected and the only excuse I have, is that I only brought
> > >>>forward a mistake that I read earlier. I remember that it was an
>article
> > >>>about the hearings in US congress in mid 70'. Will however not do
this
> > >>>mistake again, but do not despair, there are many others I will do
and
> > >>>surely in my far from perfect English. -:)
> > >>>What was his field at Berkeley?
> > >>>Hakan
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