Not going into the issue of whether or not an attack on Iraq was just, I find it a little hard to swallow that the Bush administration did not distort intelligence.

Cheney recently (Jan. 22, ‘04) referred to the trailers discovered in Iraq in May as being part of Saddam’s biological weapons program, even though this was put into doubt by British investigations last June, and although David Kay was expressing doubts in October (although I think it was before Kay’s recent report, and initially Kay had been very positive about the trailers being WMD labs).

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5573.htm

Of course, Cheney did qualify his statement with “believe [they] were part of [the biological weapons] program,” but he also stated that they were “conclusive evidence” of Saddam’s programs for mass destruction.

It certainly doesn’t sound as if he is at the mercy of the intellignet agencies.

There is also the issue of the creation of the Office of Special Plans to provide intelligence analysis, which many believe occurred because the CIA wasn’t coming to the conclusions the administration wanted.

http://www.warblogging.com/archives/000745.php
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030512fa_fact

Perhaps this is all misinterpretation and the issue really was mistaken intelligence.

But I think we should be as skeptical of that claim as we were when Justin Timberlake claimed Janet Jackson’s exposed breast was a “wardrobe malfunction.”

There is a lot more to the story of the trailers found in Iraq than Mr. Jose’s link would suggest. For some light rather than heat, take a look at today’s column by Terence Jeffrey at http://www.townhall.com/columnists/terencejeffrey/tj20040204.shtml

Thanks for Mr. Coleman for the reference to the Jeffrey column. The president has been falsely called a liar so many times on the war, that a prudent response when an article suggests he or his people have lied is to check into it further. To paraphrase Mr. Jose, one should find a little hard to swallow any claim that the Bush administration deliberately distorted intelligence.

I am not a wholehearted supporter of the Iraq war, but I tire of the false accusations.

When we invaded in 2003, the existence of WMDs and WMD programs was strongly believed by the following nations’ intelligence agencies: Russia, Germany, France, Great Britain, the USA, and Israel, among others.

Note that each country does its own intelligence work and does not merely take another country’s word for anything this important. Thus, they all independently believed the same thing. You can choose to believe they were all incorrect (possible to some degree, but unlikely to an absolute degree); you can choose to believe that somehow they actually knew better but lied or the politicians distorted the intelligence (pretty much beyond the bounds of reason, given the independence of all these agencies and politicians in so many different countries); or, you can believe that, by announcing our plans months in advance, we gave Saddam time to ship incriminating evidence out of the country, which is corroborated by satellite reconnaissance showing greatly increased truck traffic on the road from Iraq to Syria in the months and weeks before the commencement of the war.

I believe the latter, in conjunction with (1) there was some internal deception within the Iraqi programs, meaning that Saddam was allowed to believe that they were bigger and more successful than they actually were, which could have damaged the accuracy of several foreign nations’ intelligence assessments, and (2) that Saddam actually had the older, staler stockpiles destroyed in secret during the 1990s. I previously thought this possibility was absurd, because doing it in secret would prevent the lifting of sanctions, while doing it openly would have led to a very likely lifting of sanctions by the UN. However, analysts from the Middle East have claimed that Saddam might do such a thing to “save face” in the Arab and Muslim worlds, while disposing of older weapons that were of questionable long-term use so that they could not be easily discovered by inspectors. In light of the obsession with “honor” and saving face in the Arab world, I judge this not so unlikely after all. Once again, by doing it in secret, it might have led to overestimates of his stockpiles by foreign intelligence, but the truck traffic to Syria suggests that those stockpiles were not too close to zero even in 2003.

Mr. Coleman makes some interesting points that I will have to consider.

I guess I am skeptical about official pronouncements in general. I am less skeptical about claims when they go against what the claimer wants to be true (in other words, if someone in the Bush administration doubts there was WMD, that is more important than if he was certain that there was WMD, or than if Ted Kennedy or Jacques Chirac says there isn’t WMD).

I am not suggesting that Bush outright lied, just that the administration tended to believe the intelligence it wanted to believe. I find the “Bush lied” crowd to be a little too unsubtle to capture the nuances of politics, where things usually exist on a continuum of truthfulness.

I am skeptical about claimes that Saddam kept the sanctions on himself by not revealing things to UN weapons inspectors, when previous US presidents Bush I and Clinton both indicated they would keep the sanctions on as long as Saddam was in power (although I suppose one could argue that the other UN countries could have overridden this if Saddam had been more forthcoming).

I also read a number of articles where the actual findings, as opposed to the analysis, of the Hutton report are not as anti-BBC as they have been made out to be.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/01/29/do2902.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2004/01/29/ixop.html

Perhaps if I though that the main intellectual force for the war had been Auster and similar people, rather than the PNAC or the National Review crowd, who seem to want World War IV and/or imposed democracy throughout the Arab world, I would be less skeptical, but I am spooked by the prospect of a conscript army attempting to remake the entire Middle East.

I would suggest to Mr. Jose that he not base every decision on the ad hominem issues, i.e. who is saying what, and what motives might they have, etc. Sometimes we need to think rationally rather than personally, such as when we observe that (1) numerous national intelligence agencies believed in Saddam’s possession of WMDs, and (2) no significant intelligence agency has dissented from that view.

If you want to play the motivations guessing game, you could consider that the intelligence agencies of Russia, Germany, and France, throughout a period of public tension between their governments and ours over the course of action to be taken, did not change their assessments of the situation in Iraq with respect to WMDs, even though they could have embarrassed
us by declaring that they doubted the existence of WMDs.

Granted, Mr. Coleman, you are right that I should not use so many ad hominem attacks. I will try at some point to read some of the more detailed explanations of people’s beliefs, such as the books by Laurie Mylroie, Richard Perle, and Michael Ledeen, so I can respond to the specific facts they present rather than inferring their reliability from their biases and other things they have said.

I do find that I tend not to trust things I hear until I have heard the other side attempt to debunk them, although I probably do tend to believe things more readily that confirm my biases.

I find it ironic that neither of us completely trust the Kay report, although we distrust it from opposite directions.

btw, I like your posts on Richard Poe’s blog on the protest voting issue.

Let me add that maybe I am wrong. Maybe Saddam did have WMD. Maybe they were moved to Syria.
And maybe he didn’t and there was a massive intelligence failure on all fronts or Saddam managed to fool us and everyone else into thinking there was, as Kay has suggested.

I doubt this, but maybe I am wrong and you are right.

I will try to deal with the question of why everyone else seemed to believe he had WMD later, but I don’t have the time and haven’t done enough research to actually give you a well-supported theory right now.

The CIA lied in the white paper. Look all you want, you’ll find no fact that supports the conclusion. You’ll also find complete fabrications that are nonsense from a scientific standpoint.

Look everywhere: you’ll find no fact that supports the white paper conclusion.

You also should note that the white paper claims that the unit had been used for WMD (hence the cleansing of it by “caustic” (although the white paper admits the “caustic” is consistent with hydrogen production) and the white paper claims the vessels for storing the hydrogen produced were to capture an exhaust gas, which even in trace amounts would reveal the WMD “fermentation” downwind. Is it not surprising that the white paper doesn’t make any mention whatsoever of what was in the vessels? If the purpose is hydrogen production there’d be hydrogen. If the vessels are to hold a tell-tale exhaust gas which reveals the WMD usage even miles downwind, and thus very much diluted, and if the unit was used for WMD production as claimed then wouldn’t you think they’d look to see what was in the vessels and report it? From the white paper it looks like either they didn’t - or that what they found didn’t support the conclusion that it was desired to reach.

The sodium azide is a mystery, but the report of its presence is tentative (and hasn’t well more than enough time passed for the tentative analyses to have been made permanent and the results revealed?) Other sources have revealed that the operators urinated into the system, explaining the urea. Some WMD system: they urinate into it.

The Iraqi sources, it now develops, are untrusted - so all that part of the white paper is based on unfonded “intelligence.” It’s also backwards to use the claims made by Powell to verify the nature of the traielr: the trailer is supposed to be verifying the claims mae by Powell.

Look hard, boys: see if you can find just one fact that supports the WMD claim.

P.S. One of the claims of the white paper is that the recent repainting of the trailer, a military vehicle, is evidence of a coverup.

A. Don’t armies tend to paint everything that doens’t move?

B. Why would they keep the trailer around to be captured, making a coverup necessary? Why not blow it into little pieces?

And then there’s the absense of any report that any satellite photograph ever revealed the complete set of trailers in use out in the wilds of Iraq. If you claim they ran them indoors that sort of defeats the claimed purpose of the trailers: to be mobile, so the inspectors wouldn’t know where to look. Caves? Sure. What caves?