A rchive Date
[ 13-07-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/7932
Where Are The WMD?
Barry Lando is a former CBS producer of 60 Minutes, and has also contributed to CBS News, Time magazine and Time-Life
What happened to Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction" and his supposed links with Al Qaeda? It's certain that the people on top of the George W. Bush administration already know the answer. It's the rest of us who've been left in the dark, because the administration didn't get the answers it wanted. Paul Wolfowitz and other officials have been pressed in recent congressional hearings and interviews for evidence of WMD, and they are hinting that they may never be found.
This point is not just of historical interest. With Bush officials now making ominous charges against Iran, the question of the reliability of American intelligence is critical.
For months, from the President on down, the U.S. government warned of Saddam's huge arsenal; disparaged those who questioned their intelligence estimates, scoffed at efforts of U.N. weapons inspectors, refused to give them more time. Now, for a month and a half the United States has had the run of Iraq and, so far, nothing has been found - other than a couple of mobile labs, with no evidence those labs ever produced any weapons - chemical or biological.
Some U.S. officials still maintain that one day they'll unearth Saddam's WMD, but it's a long, tough slog. The inspectors are still complaining that they are getting neither the resources nor the intelligence they need to do the job. Which leads us to suspect the Bush administration is no longer really serious about looking.
Which is probably true - and this is the point: While U.S. forces have been chasing around the country checking out thousands of suspected sites, at the same time, military intelligence officials have been following a much simpler tack: interrogating thousands of former officials of Saddam's regime, civilians and military.
So, a few simple questions:
- What have they learned from those interrogations? If Saddam had WMD, he certainly had to be planning to use them in some situations. Those plans had to involve tens of thousands of Iraqi military. He had to have trained and equipped his troops - or at least his elite units - to employ them, right?
- What have the military - from small unit commanders to top ranking generals - told their American interrogators about Saddam's plans for WMD? What kind of instruction did they get? For what kinds of weapons? Under what circumstances were they to be used?
- Coalition troops found chemical and biological protective gear with some of the Iraqi units. What was that gear for? Offensive or defensive purposes?
- If Saddam hid his WMD or moved them to Syria, that also would have involved hundreds if not thousands of men. Where are they? Or were they all liquidated?
The hypothesis floating around - that Saddam destroyed his WMD before the coalition attacked - makes little sense. If Saddam was willing to destroy them, why not simply give them up and ward off the invasion? But say he had destroyed them; he didn't do it one moonless night just by himself and his sons.
What have the top civilian members of Saddam's government said about all this? We are told some might be concerned about war crimes charges if they admitted to participating in a WMD program. But why? What hypothetical war crimes did they commit?
No, it's certain that most of Saddam's military and civilian officials told their U.S. interrogators just about anything the United States wanted to know - about WMD and about supposed links with Al Qaeda. It just wasn't what the people on high wanted to hear.
In fact, G. W. Bush administration watchers have noted some remarkable contortions of late. Take Kenneth Adleman, a member of the government's Defense Policy Board. He told The Washington Post on April 10 that, with fear of Saddam almost gone, the United States should have the information on Iraq's WMD "in the next five days."
Five weeks later, on May 17, Adelman told the Post he'd had second thoughts. It was possible that Saddam's whole program of WMD was a gigantic hoax. Not a hoax perpetrated by the Bush administration, mind you, but by Saddam himself. Saddam may, said Adelman, have launched "a massive disinformation campaign to make the world think he was violating international norms, and he may not have been."
Bottom line: There is no doubt by now that the Bush administration has a 99 percent complete picture of what Saddam was up to with his WMD. And that they no longer posed a threat, if they ever did - which is why U.S. forces are no longer seriously searching Iraq.
By the same logic, the Bushies also have learned that Saddam had no links with Al Qaeda. If any Iraqi official had backed up that claim, you can bet it would have been trumpeted by the White House and Pentagon within hours.
Instead of divulging what they've really found, the Bush administration has chosen another way to admit they were dead wrong, by ordering a complete review of the intelligence process leading to the U.S. invasion. An excellent idea in principle, though no one really expects that the investigators will ever officially reveal the prime reason for the flawed intelligence estimates - because of pressure from the neo cons on high. They are the same folks who are now glowering at Iran.
Published: May 29 2003
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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