[Media-watch] FW: How the case for war became unstuck

[David Miller]

Evidence And Deceit: How The Case For War Became Unstuck

by Glen Rangwala; Dissident Voice <http://www.dissidentvoice.org/> ;
June 02, 2003 	

The disclosure from a British official that the "intelligence" dossier
on Iraq's weapons presented by Tony Blair to Parliament on 24 September
last year was beefed up on Downing Street's orders came as little
surprise to those who have watched the British government's use and
suspected misuse of intelligence information over the past six months. 



The series of leaks and off-the-record briefings to journalists from
serving and recently retired members of the US and UK intelligence
community has been without recent parallels. Transcripts of interviews,
classified briefings on Iraq's links with al-Qa'ida and assessments of
the likelihood of the spread of democracy in the Middle East on the back
on an invasion of Iraq have all found their way into the public domain. 



There have been a number of sources for the dissatisfaction, but one of
the more palpable factors is the sense that the intelligence agencies
were being credited with providing a rationale for an invasion of Iraq
that was at odds with their actual findings. With a war being justified
primarily on the basis of putative intelligence assessments, the
intelligence services did not want to risk being the subject of the
political backlash if those assessments were found to be faulty. 



That there were significant problems with the material presented by the
British government on Iraq's weapons cannot seriously be questioned.
After all, Qusai Hussein did not use Iraq's prohibited weapons at 45
minutes notice, as the dossier alleged three times that he could -- a
claim that, we now find, came from a single source whose evidence was
considered unreliable. The twenty 650km range missiles that the dossier
claimed were hidden in Iraq were not fired at Israel or Cyprus. And
there were no drones in the skies above British troops, spraying them
with chemical or biological weapons. 



Despite his earnest protestations on the accuracy of his evidence, Tony
Blair told a press conference in Poland on Friday that finding the
weapons in Iraq is "not the most urgent priority". And yet, according to
the claims of the dossier that he defends, Saddam Hussein "has a useable
chemical and biological weapons capability" and that his "current
military planning specifically envisages the use" of these weapons.
Saddam Hussein and the commanders whom the Prime Minister claimed had
the authority to order the use of these weapons are still at large,
presumably still within Iraq. If Tony Blair's evidence is to be
believed, these individuals are still likely to have the capacity to use
those weapons. It is difficult to imagine what more urgent priority
there could be: either the evidence was flawed or the present policies
are deeply reckless. 



The information of Colin Powell presented to the Security Council with
great fanfare on 5 February has proved even more vulnerable than Tony
Blair's evidence. Powell provided specific details of people and sites
that are now under the control of US forces. However, there has been no
sign of the biologically-armed "missile brigade" he claimed was
stationed outside Baghdad in the palm tree groves. The Republican Guard
commanders whose voices Powell played, allegedly talking about the
concealment of nerve agents, have not showed up. The scientists whom he
told us were being prevented from talking due to fear of Saddam Hussein
have not now divulged any secrets. The supposed "poison camp" near
Khurmal, with its network of tunnels and elaborate chemical
infrastructure, has been found to have no such facilities. As for the
"nearly two dozen" al-Qa'ida "affiliates" that Powell showed photographs
of, claiming that they were based in Baghdad, seem to have vanished into
thin air. 



One key tactic of the British and American governments was to talk up
suspicions, and to portray possibility as fact. The clearest example was
the quotation and misquotation of the reports of UN weapons inspectors.
Iraq claimed that it had destroyed all its prohibited weapons, either
unilaterally or in cooperation with the inspectors, in the period
between 1991 and 1994. Although the inspectors were able to verify that
unilateral destruction took place on a large scale, they were never able
to quantify the amounts destroyed. For example, they were able to detect
that anthrax growth media had been burnt and buried in bulk at a site
adjacent to the production facility at al-Hakam. There was no way -- and
there never will be -- to tell from the soil samples the amount
destroyed. As a result, UN inspectors recorded this material as
unaccounted for, neither verified as destroyed nor believed to still
exist. Inspectors had to keep probing for this material according to
their mandate, to verify if any of this material was left in Iraq. 



However, when this possibility was translated into statements of the
British and American governments it became material that they claimed
Iraq had as part of "stockpiles" that they were hiding from the
inspectors. This was done in the knowledge that UN inspectors had not
found any nuclear, chemical or biological weapons in Iraq since at least
1994, aside from a dozen abandoned mustard shells, and that the vast
majority of any weapons produced before 1991 would have degraded to the
point of uselessness within ten years. Even the most high profile
defector from Iraq -- Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law and
director of Iraq's weapons programmes -- had told UN inspectors and
British intelligence agencies in 1995 that Iraq had no more prohibited
weapons. 



And yet Tony Blair's dossier repeats the false claim that information
"in the public domain from UN reports ... points clearly to Iraq's
continuing possession, after 1991, of chemical and biological agents and
weapons produced before the Gulf War". There is no UN report after 1994
that claims that Iraq continued to possess weapons of mass destruction,
and this was well-known in intelligence circles. That such a claim could
appear in a purported intelligence document betrays clear signs that the
information was pumped up for political purposes in order to support the
case for an invasion. 



Blair's case began to resort to more direct misquotation in the
immediate prelude to war, with UN chief inspector Hans Blix reporting on
7 March that Iraq was taking "numerous initiatives ... with a view to
resolving long-standing open disarmament issues", and that this "can be
seen as 'active', or even 'proactive'" cooperation. In response, Mr
Blair and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw seized on the Unmovic working
document of 6 March 2003 entitled "Unresolved Disarmament Issues". As
the document's title makes apparent, this document is about matters that
are still unclear, not that have been decided one way or another. Hans
Blix openly acknowledged Iraqi efforts to resolve these questions. And
yet the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary have repeatedly claimed
that this document makes the case that Iraq retains prohibited weapons,
a claim that the report never makes. They relied upon the presumption --
probably accurate -- that few MPs would have the time to go through its
173 pages, and would accept the Government's misleading precis. 



An example of how misleading that presentation has been can be found in
Tony Blair's speech to the Commons two days before the war commenced in
order to obtain the approval of MPs for an invasion. Blair's first quote
from the report in his speech -- his first allegation about Iraq -- was
that Iraq "had had far reaching plans to weaponise VX". Note the verb's
tense in that quote. That quotation, about the deadly nerve agent VX,
was from a "background" section of the Unmovic report, on Iraq's policy
before 1991. Blair presented that quote without any context, leading
many MPs no doubt to think that this was the UN's assessment of current
Iraqi policy. 



In the key new section of the report on VX, Unmovic reported that "route
B", the method Iraq used to produce the 1.5 tonnes of VX before 1990
that have been repeatedly mentioned by US and UK leaders, did not lead
to a stable chemical that Iraq could still possess. According to the
weapons inspectors, "VX produced through route B must be used relatively
quickly after production (about 1 to 8 weeks)". In other words, Blair's
first piece of "evidence" was about a substance that the weapons
inspectors consider to have been no threat since early 1991. Tony Blair
didn't tell the MPs that. 



The second flaw that has become apparent in the Anglo-American case for
war is the reliance that they placed upon defectors that were extricated
by one opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress (INC). The INC, led
by Ahmad al-Chalabi, have long been mistrusted by both British
intelligence and by the CIA, who have instead promoted the rival Iraqi
National Accord, various Kurdish groups and the nationalist grouping
around former foreign minister Adnan Pachachi. The INC, more riven by
prominent defections from 1994 than the Iraqi government itself and
under constant suspicion for its perceived financial malpractices, had
by the late 1990s only one major asset: its alliance with the
neoconservative right of the Republican party. 



To perpetuate that alliance, the INC had to produce information that the
neocons could use, firstly to bash the Clinton administration for its
inaction on Iraq, and then -- when they assumed power -- to justify to
their audiences the need for an invasion of Iraq. In return, the
Pentagon freed up an $8 million fund for the INC that the Senate had
stalled in 2002, to use in part for an intelligence-collection
programme. Many within the intelligence agencies believed that the INC
was "coaching" Iraqis who had defected to tell alarmist stories about
the seriousness of the threat of Iraq, and so signal their own
institutional importance. 



A considerable number of stories circulated by the INC have subsequently
been discredited. An INC-sponsored Iraqi "technician" claimed that Iraq
had acquired a pressurized water reactor (PWR) for its nuclear weapons
program, even though PWRs cannot produce plutonium with any efficiency,
and the countries from which the defector claimed Iraq had bought the
PWR were in no position to be able to sell one. They coordinated the
activities of one defector, a civil engineer, who claimed to have been
engaged in building secret facilities inside Iraq for chemical and
biological laboratories, including underground facilities. When the
inspectors were allowed to return to Iraq, they scanned the areas named
with ground-penetrating radar, and found that no such structures
existed. 



One of the INC's biggest stories was immediately after September 11th
when they brought to international attention three defectors, all of
whom claimed that they had personal experience at an Iraqi "terrorist
training camp" at Salman Pak, where fighters were trained to hijack
aeroplanes. The link explicitly made by many of the defectors and by the
INC was that this facility may have been used to train the operatives
who attacked New York and Washington. However, not a single one of the
September 11th hijackers has been reliably traced as having visited Iraq
in recent times, and the story was allowed to die. On capturing the site
inside Iraq, US and UK forces found that the facilities at Salman Pak
were strikingly different from those described by the defectors. 



In spite of this extensive record of discredited allegations, and the
concomitant suspicion from government agencies, the political leadership
on both sides of the Atlantic continued to give credibility to émigrés
associated with Ahmad al-Chalabi. Information from defectors was
repeatedly cited by Tony Blair in his dossier and speeches, and
particularly by members of the Bush administration, as being a major
source for their allegation about Iraq. A high percentage of the
defectors cited by Colin Powell to the Security Council were linked to
the INC. 



The political agenda of Chalabi influenced not only the information
presented by the UK and US governments, but also the content of the
stories in the most prominent newspaper of the US. In a recently leaked
email, the senior reporter at the New York Times, Judith Miller,
disclosed that "I've been covering Chalabi for about 10 years ... He has
provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper." One of
Miller's recent pieces was on how an unnamed Iraqi scientist claimed
that Iraq had destroyed all its weapons immediately prior to the
conflict. The story was wholly implausible -- the last thing that a
tyrant would do before an invasion would be to destroy his most lethal
weapons -- and appears to be another one of Chalabi's concoctions. This
didn't stop the New York Times running it on their front page, and it
being picked up by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as an
explanation of why none of Iraq's weapons had been found. 



The extent of the collapse of the US and UK case on Iraq's weapons is
most clear in how the search for weapons has so far been fruitless. Few
biological weapons experts agree that the trucks presented by the
Pentagon as being mobile biological production facilities were anything
of the sort. The Iraqi scientists who used the trucks claimed that they
were used for the production of hydrogen, an explanation that would fit
with what is known about the trucks. The photograph of these trailers
released by the Pentagon showed vehicles whose sides were sheets of
canvas that was simply pinned down. If such vehicles had been used for
containing anthrax fermenters, a downwind footprint of anthrax
contamination would have been detected fairly readily. A UN inspector
previously engaged in the search for mobile production facilities inside
Iraq has informed me that the chances that such a vehicle could have
been used for biological agents are minimal. 



Standing alongside President Bush in April, Tony Blair declared that,
"On weapons of mass destruction, we know that the regime has them, we
know that as the regime collapses we will be led to them. We pledged to
disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction and we will keep that
commitment." Seventy-three days after the invasion began, there are
still no reliable signs that Iraq had any chemical, biological or
nuclear weapons, or has had any over the past eight years. Indeed, the
only reliable signs of illicit weapons that have been found in Iraq are
the cluster bombs that were dropped from US and UK jets. 





  _____  

Dr. Glen Rangwala is a lecturer in Politics at Newham College,
Cambridge, UK. He works with the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq (
<http://www.casi.org.uk/index.html> www.casi.org.uk/index.html ). He can
be reached at:  <mailto:glen at casi.org.uk> glen at casi.org.uk