Unprecedented Revelations

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1. WMD just a convenient excuse for war, admits Wolfowitz
Independent, UK May 30

2. Robin Cook: Britain must not be suckered a second time by the White
House - The British government needs to concede that we went to war for
reasons of US foreign policy and Republican Party politics
Independent, UK May 30 

3. British, US claims on Iraq's WMD could be intelligence blunder
Straits Times, Singapore May 30 

4. Government blames spies over war
Independent, UK May 30 
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1. WMD just a convenient excuse for war, admits Wolfowitz
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=410730
By David Usborne 30 May 2003

(*** SEE also from Agence France Presse - US-Bush-Iraq-weapons, Bush
insists Iraq had weapons of mass destruction as doubts grow
http://www.afp.com/english/home/ )
(*** SEE also Baghdad 'destroyed weapons before war' - Rumsfeld on why
there's still no sign of dreaded weapon, from Straits Times, Singapore
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/world/story/0,4386,191884,00.html? )


The Bush administration focused on alleged weapons of mass destruction as
the primary justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force because it
was politically convenient, a top-level official at the Pentagon has
acknowledged.

The extraordinary admission comes in an interview with Paul Wolfowitz, the
Deputy Defence Secretary, in the July issue of the magazine Vanity Fair.

Mr Wolfowitz also discloses that there was one justification that was
"almost unnoticed but huge". That was the prospect of the United States
being able to withdraw all of its forces from Saudi Arabia once the threat
of Saddam had been removed. Since the taking of Baghdad, Washington has
said that it is taking its troops out of the kingdom. "Just lifting that
burden from the Saudis is itself going to the door" towards making progress
elsewhere in achieving Middle East peace, Mr Wolfowitz said. The presence
of the US military in Saudi Arabia has been one of the main grievances of
al-Qa'ida and other terrorist groups.

"For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass
destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on," Mr
Wolfowitz tells the magazine.

The comments suggest that, even for the US administration, the logic that
was presented for going to war may have been an empty shell. They come to
light, moreover, just two days after Mr Wolfowitz's immediate boss, Donald
Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, conceded for the first time that the arms
might never be found.

The failure to find a single example of the weapons that London and
Washington said were inside Iraq only makes the embarrassment more acute.
Voices are increasingly being raised in the US ­ and Britain ­
demanding an explanation for why nothing has been found.

Most striking is the fact that these latest remarks come from Mr Wolfowitz,
recognised widely as the leader of the hawks' camp in Washington most
responsible for urging President George Bush to use military might in Iraq.
The magazine article reveals that Mr Wolfowitz was even pushing Mr Bush to
attack Iraq immediately after the 11 September attacks in the US, instead
of invading Afghanistan.

There have long been suspicions that Mr Wolfowitz has essentially been
running a shadow administration out of his Pentagon office, ensuring that
the right-wing views of himself and his followers find their way into the
practice of American foreign policy. He is best known as the author of the
policy of first-strike pre-emption in world affairs that was adopted by Mr
Bush shortly after the al-Qa'ida attacks.

In asserting that weapons of mass destruction gave a rationale for
attacking Iraq that was acceptable to everyone, Mr Wolfowitz was presumably
referring in particular to the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell. He was
the last senior member of the administration to agree to the push earlier
this year to persuade the rest of the world that removing Saddam by force
was the only remaining viable option.

The conversion of Mr Powell was on full view in the UN Security Council in
February when he made a forceful presentation of evidence that allegedly
proved that Saddam was concealing weapons of mass destruction.

Critics of the administration and of the war will now want to know how
convinced the Americans really were that the weapons existed in Iraq to the
extent that was publicly stated. Questions are also multiplying as to the
quality of the intelligence provided to the White House. Was it simply
faulty ­ given that nothing has been found in Iraq ­ or was it
influenced by the White House's fixation on the weapons issue? Or were the
intelligence agencies telling the White House what it wanted to hear?

This week, Sam Nunn, a former senator, urged Congress to investigate
whether the argument for war in Iraq was based on distorted intelligence.
He raised the possibility that Mr Bush's policy against Saddam had
influenced the intelligence that indicated Baghdad had weapons of mass
destruction.

This week, the CIA and the other American intelligence agencies have
promised to conduct internal reviews of the quality of the material they
supplied the administration on what was going on in Iraq. The heat on the
White House was only made fiercer by Mr Rumsfeld's admission that nothing
may now be found in Iraq to back up those earlier claims, if only because
the Iraqis may have got rid of any evidence before the conflict.

"It is also possible that they decided that they would destroy them prior
to a conflict," the Defence Secretary said.

* The US military said last night that it had released a suspected Iraqi
war criminal by mistake. US Central Command said it was offering a $25,000
(315,000) reward for the capture of Mohammed Jawad An-Neifus, suspected of
being involved in the murder of thousands of Iraqi Shia Muslims whose
remains were found at a mass grave in Mahawil, southern Iraq, last month.

The alleged mobile weapons laboratories

As scepticism grows over the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq, London and Washington are attempting to turn the focus of attention
to Iraq's alleged possession of mobile weapons labs.

A joint CIA and Defence Intelligence Agency report released this week
claimed that two trucks found in northern Iraq last month were mobile labs
used to develop biological weapons. The trucks were fitted with hi-tech
laboratory equipment and the report said the discovery represented the
"strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biowarfare programme".

The design of the vehicles made them "an ingeniously simple self-contained
bioprocessing system". The report said no other purpose, for example water
purification, medical laboratory or vaccine production, would justify such
effort and expense.

But critics arenot convinced. No biological agents were found on the trucks
and experts point out that, unlike the trucks described by Colin Powell,
the Secretary of State, in a speech to the UN Security Council, they were
open sided and would therefore have left a trace easy for weapons
inspectors to detect. One former UN inspector said that the trucks would
have been a very inefficient way to produce anthrax.
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2. Robin Cook: Britain must not be suckered a second time by the White
House
The British government needs to concede that we went to war for reasons of
US foreign policy and Republican Party politics
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=410664
30 May 2003

Chutzpah was the word that used to be applied to people who radiated belief
in themselves without possessing any visible reason to justify it. In the
chutzpah stakes Donald Rumsfeld is way off the top of the scale.

Before the war he told us that Saddam had "large stockpiles of chemical and
biological weapons and an active programme to develop nuclear weapons".
After the war he explains away the failure to find any of these stockpiles
or nuclear installations on the possibility that Saddam's regime "decided
they would destroy them prior to a conflict''. You have to admire his
effrontery.

But not his logic. The least plausible explanation is that Saddam destroyed
his means of defence on the eve of an invasion. The more plausible
explanation is that he did not have any large stockpiles of weapons of mass
destruction.

We need to rescue the meaning of words from becoming a further casualty of
the Iraqi War. A weapon of mass destruction in normal speech is a device
capable of being delivered over a long distance and exterminating a
strategic target such as a capital city. Saddam had neither a long-range
missile system nor a warhead capable of mass destruction.

Laboratory stocks of biological toxins or chemical shells for use on the
battlefield do not add up to weapons of mass destruction. But we have not
yet found even any of these.

When the Cabinet discussed the dossier on Saddam's weapons of mass
destruction I argued that I found the document curiously "derivative''. It
set out what we knew about Saddam's chemical and biological arsenal at the
time of the (previous) Gulf War. It rehearsed our inability to discover
what had happened to those weapons. It then leapt to the conclusion that
Saddam must still possess all those weapons. There was no hard intelligence
of a current weapons programme that would represent a new and compelling
threat to our interests.

Nor did the dossier at any stage admit the basic scientific fact that
biological and chemical agents have a finite shelf life. Odd, since it is a
principle understood by every chemist. Go in to your medicine cupboard and
check out the existence of an expiry date on nearly everything you possess.

Nerve agents of good quality have a shelf life of about five years and
anthrax in liquid solution of about three years. Saddam's stocks were not
of good quality. The Pentagon itself concluded that Iraqi chemical
munitions were of such poor standard that they were produced to a
"make-and-use'' regime under which they were usable for only a few weeks.
Even if Saddam had destroyed none of his arsenal from 1991 it would long
ago have become useless.

It is inconceivable that no one in the Pentagon told Donald Rumsfeld these
home truths, or at the very least tried to tell him. So why did he build a
case for war on a false claim of Saddam's capability?

Enter stage right (far right) his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, a man of such
ferociously reactionary opinion that he has at least the advantage to his
department of making Rumsfeld appear reasonable. He has now disclosed: "For
bureaucratic reasons we settled on weapons of mass destruction because it
was the one issue everyone could agree on.''

Wolfowitz is famously a regime-change champion. He was one of the flock of
Republican hawks who wanted a war to take over Iraq long before 11
September. Decoded, what his remarks mean is that the Pentagon went along
with allegations of weapons of mass destruction as the price of getting
Colin Powell and the British government on board for war. But the Pentagon
probably did not believe in the case then and certainly cannot prove it
now.

Wolfowitz also let the cat out of the bag over the "huge prize" for the
Pentagon from the invasion of Iraq. It has furnished them with an
alternative to Saudi Arabia as a base for US influence in the region.

As Donald Rumsfeld might express it, we have been suckered. Britain was
conned into a war to disarm a phantom threat in which not even our major
ally really believed. The truth is that the US chose to attack Iraq not
because it posed a threat, but because they knew it was weak and expected
its military to collapse.

It is a truth that leaves the British government in an uncomfortable
position. This week Tony Blair was pleading for everyone to show patience
and to wait for weapons to be found. There is an historic problem with this
plea. The war only took place because the coalition powers lost patience
with Hans Blix and refused his plea for a few more months to complete his
disarmament tasks.

There is also a growing problem of transatlantic politics with the British
Prime Minister's plea for more time. The US administration wanted the war
to achieve regime change and now they have got it they do not see why they
need to keep up the pretence that they fought it to deliver disarmament.
The more time passes, the greater the gulf will widen between the obliging
candour on the US side that there never was a weapons threat and the
desperate obfuscation on the British side that we might still find one.

There is always a bigger problem in denying reality than in admitting the
truth. The time has come when the British government needs to concede that
we did not go to war because Saddam was a threat to our national interests.
We went to war for reasons of US foreign policy and Republican domestic
politics.

One advantage of such clarity is that it would help prevent us from being
suckered a second time. Which brings us to Rumsfeld's latest sabre-rattling
against Iran. It is consistent with the one-dimensional character of the
Rumsfeld world view that he talks of Iran as if it were a single unified
entity. In fact, Iran is deeply divided by a power struggle.

On the one side, there are President Khatami and the majority of the
parliament who are reformers, reflecting the political reality that most
Iranians consistently vote to join the modern world. On the other hand are
the conservative forces of the old Islamic revolutionaries led by Ayatollah
Khamanei, who still retains control over the security apparatus.

When Labour took office I initiated a policy of constructive engagement
with the reformist government, which has been skilfully continued by Jack
Straw. It bore fruit for us in their renunciation of the fatwa on Salman
Rushdie and it has been helpful to them in providing credibility as people
who could build a positive relationship with the outside world.

The blanket hostility to Iran of the Bush administration has undermined the
reformers and provided a welcome shot in the arm to the ayatollahs.

British policy on Iran makes sense in securing the advance of the
reformers, which is in the interests of ourselves and of the Iranian
people. This time we must make clear to the White House that we are not
going to subordinate Britain's interests to a US policy of confrontation.
Iran must not become the next Iraq.
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3. British, US claims on Iraq's WMD could be intelligence blunder
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/latest/story/0,4390,191953,00.html?
Straits Times, Singapore May 30 

LONDON -- As fears grow that the public were misled over Iraq's alleged
weapons of mass destruction, senior politicians in London and Washington
told the British press on Friday that unprecedented intelligence blunders
could be to blame.

An unnamed senior British government minister told the left-wing
Independent daily that the failure to find weapons of mass destruction
(WMD) in Iraq would constitute 'Britain's biggest ever intelligence
failure' and would trigger an overhaul of the security services.

'This could conceivably be the greatest intelligence hoax of all time. I
doubt it, but we have to ask,' Ms Jane Harman, the senior Democrat on the
US's House Select Committee on Intelligence, told The Times.

'It was the moral justification for the war. I think the world is owed an
accounting,' she said.

'My concern is that we did not have enough good intelligence to draw the
necessary conclusions that our policy makers need to be completely
confident,' Mr Peter Goss, the Republican chairman of the select committee
told The Times.

'Wouldn't it be nice if we gave them better information to base their
judgments on?' he asked.

Their committee has written to Central Intelligence Agency director George
Tenet asking him to respond by July 1 on several key questions, with a view
to holding hearings later that month, the newspaper said.

A copy of the letter, which the Times reported it had seen, asks Mr Tenet
whether the intelligence was of sufficient quantity, quality and
reliability, how it was analysed, and whether 'any dissenting views were
properly weighed'.

'The committee is interested in understanding how the CIA's analysis of
Iraq's linkages to terrorist groups, such as Al-Qaeda was derived,' the
letter says, according to the same source.

The right-wing Daily Telegraph said that the issue was far graver for
British Prime Minister Tony Blair than for US President George W. Bush who
presented a far wider public case for war than the British leader did in
the House of Commons.

'Blair, desperate for the support of his own party, nailed himself firmly
to the mast of WMD (weapons of mass destruction) and allowed his spin
machine to exaggerate the danger to Britain,' the newspaper said.

British government officials, quoted in the Financial Times business
newspaper, said that British and US military planners were depending on
Saddam Hussein's regime using its weapons of mass destruction as proof that
Iraq possessed them and were not expecting to mount a wide-scale hunt for a
hidden arsenal. -- AFP

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4. Government blames spies over war
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=410741
By Paul Waugh, Deputy Political Editor
30 May 2003

A senior minister warned yesterday that the failure to find weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq would constitute "Britain's biggest ever intelligence
failure" and would trigger an overhaul of the security services.

The minister told The Independent that the security services were
responsible for Downing Street's uncompromising stance on Saddam Hussein's
weapons. He spoke after a row erupted between politicians and the
intelligence community over the Government's justification for going to
war.

A senior intelligence official also told the BBC that Downing Street had
wanted the Government dossier outlining Saddam's capability "sexed up" and
that Downing Street included information against security service advice.

Meanwhile, Washington dealt another devastating blow to Tony Blair, who was
visiting troops in Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz, the US Deputy Defence Secretary,
said that disarming Saddam of illegal weapons was nothing more than a
"bureaucratic reason" for war.

He told Vanity Fair magazine that members of the divided White House
cabinet pushed the issue because it was the only way they could present a
united front.

The row over weapons of mass destruction was fuelled this week when Donald
Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, suggested that Saddam might have
destroyed his arsenal before the invasion.

While the British minister told The Independent he was confident weapons
evidence would still be found in Iraq, he admitted: "If we don't find any
weapons of mass destruction, it will be Britain's biggest ever intelligence
failure. We would have to look at the whole set-up of how we gather
intelligence in the future. It would have serious consequences. We saw some
of this stuff, but Tony saw it come across his desk virtually every day."

In another development, Adam Ingram, the Armed Forces minister, admitted
that Mr Blair's claim that Iraq could unleash chemical or biological
weapons at 45 minutes' notice was based on uncorroborated information. The
assertion was included in Downing Street's case for war, entitled: "Iraq's
Weapons of Mass Destruction: the Assessment of the British Government''.

Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary, reveals in The Independent today
that he argued that the dossier was curiously "derivative" when it was
discussed by the Cabinet. "There was no hard intelligence of a current
weapons programme that would represent a new and compelling threat to our
interests," he writes, adding that Mr Wolfowitz's comments proved that
Britain had been "suckered" into going to war.

Mr Blair faced more embarrassment as MPs demanded a full-scale inquiry into
intelligence claims that Downing Street had distorted the dossier,
published last September. In the dossier, Mr Blair warned that Saddam was
able to launch chemical or biological attacks within 45 minutes.

BBC Radio 4's Today programme quoted an unnamed "senior British official"
as saying the claim was included against the wishes of intelligence
officers, who had been ordered to "sex up" a drier draft version of the
document.

The official said: "Most people in intelligence weren't happy with the
dossier because it didn't reflect the considered view they were putting
forward. The classic example was the statement that weapons of mass
destruction were ready for use within 45 minutes. That information was not
in the original draft. It was included in the dossier against our wishes
because it wasn't reliable. Most things in the dossier were double source
but that was single source, and we believe that the source was wrong."

Downing Street flatly denied that pressure had been put on officers.
Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister's director of communications and
strategy, said in Iraq yesterday: "This is totally false. There is nothing
there that was not the work of the intelligence agencies."

Mr Ingram acknowledged that the 45-minute claim was based on a single
source. He said: "That was said on the basis of security source information
... it was not corroborated ... that was one element within a
comprehensive report."

But he stressed that the security services had supported the report. "The
whole world knew what Saddam was up to in terms of weapons of mass
destruction. That's why we prosecuted that war," he said.

When questioned about the continuing controversy, Mr Blair insisted that he
had "absolutely no doubt at all" about the existence of weapons of mass
destruction. "And rather than speculating, let's wait until we get the full
report back from our people who are interviewing the Iraqi scientists," he
said. "We have already found two trailers that both our and the American
security services believe were used for the manufacture of chemical and
biological weapons."

Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, called
for a special MPs' committee to be set up to investigate claims that the
report was amended.


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