Comments on: Saddam WMD follow up

By: Wallsy

Wallsy — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 23:21:33 +0000

It seems to me that this “everybody knew” discourse is being consteucted in order to play down the seriousness of the very real scandals afoot. I believe the same tactic was used to defuse the Downing Street memo scoop too. When I think about figures such as McAdams I am put in mind of Chomsky’s obedient intellectual classes fuelling and internalising hegemonic knowledge consensus in order to support the political agendas of the power elite.

By: Eric

Eric — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 22:56:36 +0000

Wallsy, the Iraqis did hand in a declaration in December 2002. What it said was they did not have WMD, the truth. Of course, US officials were “disappointed,” and said at the time “it seeks to deceive when it says Iraq has no ongoing weapons of mass destruction programs.” Yes, documentation may have been missing for reasons you cite. We can’t be sure. Except for a small piece leaked to die tageszeitung, the US made sure it stayed under wraps.

By: Eric

Eric — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 22:44:32 +0000

Beard (Wolf Blitzer, CNN Late Edition) was pretty good today with UK Defense Minister John Reid. He actually tried to stay focused on the document forgeries and quoted the Downing Street Memo as counterpoint to the Butler report. Guess its okay to needle a Brit. But this canard about “everybody knew” Saddam had WMD is certainly widespread from officialdom and throughout the wing. I’ll post more when the transcript comes out.

By: Wallsy

Wallsy — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 15:38:29 +0000

I am stunned at McAdam’s own ahistoricity. Why has not mentioned Powell’s very own assessment, probablt based on CIA intelligence, in 2002 of the Iraqi threat. He claimed then in the hot lights of the television media that Saddam Hussen was not a threat. Furthermore, this was corroborated by one Condi Rice. Then of course there is the issue of the intellignece cooked up at the office of special plans (is that the correct designation?) which one former Pentagon employee witnessed was going on under the supervision of Cheney and Rumsfeld. Then of course there is a whole hosto of former UNSCOM employees, Ritter et al, whose testimonies could not have been ignored by both intelligence officials and White House officials prior to 2003. I know Bush is aloof and away with the fairies but he does not exist a vacuum and it is clear to me that he must have been aware of all the intelligence data connected to Iraq, given that one of his own had publicly aired sections fo it. And then there is the fact that the Iraqi government had indeed handed over reports mof their weapons programs (or their dismantlement). As Phyllis Bennis, Milan Rai had both extensively reported on. The dilemma for the Hussein regime prior to the war was that handing over a report that corroborated that Saddam had had a wespons programs would have given the Bush Administration carte blanche since Bush’ own ahistoricity would have placed an old report in the constructed context of an Iraqi threat being promulgated in 2002. If, on the other hand, Hussein had not handed in the report, that again would have been “evidence” of denial, again giving carte blanche to the war machine. Of course, the fact that the Bush War Machine had absolutely no right to act unilaterlly is omitted from McAdams’s analysis…an offence alone in my book!

By: Eric

Eric — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 10:55:57 +0000

Think Progress has a display on the Jehl piece, “Report Warned Bush Team About Intelligence Suspicions”

By: Eric

Eric — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 08:37:43 +0000

Good point. A couple posts back I recommended reading Josh Marshall to follow this.

Meanwhile, I’ve found McAdams’s blog. A bit obsessed — sees liberal malfeasance crashing in all around him.

By: Rider

Rider — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 08:33:03 +0000

The piece which Douglas Jehl is publishing in tomorrow’s NYT also undercuts the everybody-believed-it argument. A DIA intelligence report written in February 2002 warned that the most senior al Qaeda prisoner in custody at that time, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, was “intentionally misleading the debriefers” and that the information being obtained from him was not credible. Perhaps there were other people who believed Saddam had WMD. But Bush was different in that he knew the “evidence” his team was presenting was false. Yet nine months after this DIA report, in October 2002, Bush cited information from al-Liby in a speech in Cincinnati. But for a knockdown-dragout fight with the CIA, Bush would also have cited the Niger uranium story, which Wilson’s trip had also refuted in February 2002.
Bush, Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld, advanced claims based on evidence they knew to be false, and then they worked to suppress countervailing evidence. Some of the other people who believed what they told them, assumed they were getting the whole truth when they weren’t.

By: Rider

Rider — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 08:16:37 +0000

The other bit of chicanery involved in citing this list of believers is the implicit suggestion that all of these people had come to this conclusion independently, when in fact that was not the case. For example, SISMI, the Italian military intelligence agency had evidently shopped the Niger forgeries or transcriptions of them around various European intelligence agencies. So, when Bush claimed the Niger story had been independently corroborated by British intelligence, this was false. In addition, a number of agencies depend on U.S. intelligence for their information in certain areas or about certain issues. So, to say that everyone believed it, may be like taking a testimonial letter, making fifty copies of it, and then claiming to have fifty testimonial letters.