Update: The Search for Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)

Summary Update: Click on the links for full story

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz cited bureaucratic reasons for focusing on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, and said a "huge" result of the war was to enable Washington to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia.

"The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason," Wolfowitz was quoted as saying in a Pentagon transcript of an interview with Vanity Fair.

Earlier this week, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Iraq's weapons of mass destruction may have been destroyed before the war. "It is also possible that they (Saddam Hussein's government) decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict," he told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

The Daily Express of London ran a report Friday on the statements by the two U.S. officials with the headline "Just Complete and Utter Lies." .

Donald Rumsfeld insisted yesterday that weapons of mass destruction were still in Iraq Former Washington security officials had claimed that US "intelligence had been cooked to the recipe of policy".Mr Rumsfeld had also said earlier this week the Iraqi regime may have destroyed chemical and biological weapons before the Anglo-American invasion.

President Bush said U.S. forces in Iraq have "found the weapons of mass destruction" that were the United States' primary justification for going to war. Bush, in remarks to Polish television to day (May 30) was citing two trailers that U.S. intelligence agencies have said were probably used as mobile biological weapons labs.

Bush said. "But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them."

Click here to read CIA's Assessment of mobile trailers suspected of Iraqi bioweapons program? (in .pdf file -needs Acrobat Reader) . Or here in html file.

Fred Kaplan ( Slate) analysed CIA's report as follows:

The report concedes that U.S. officials found no traces of any bioweapons agent inside the trailers. "We suspect," it states, "that the Iraqis thoroughly decontaminated the vehicle to remove evidence." That's possible.

The report also notes that, in order to produce biological weapons, each trailer would have to be accompanied by a second and possibly a third trailer, specially designed to grow, process, sterilize, and dry the bacteria. Such trailers would "have equipment such as mixing tanks, centrifuges, and spray dryers"—none of which were spotted in the trailers that were found. The problem, the CIA acknowledges, is that "we have not yet found" these post-production trailers. Question: Is it that they haven't been found—or that they don't exist?

It could well be that the CIA is right about its inferences. Either way, these trailers—simply by being capable of producing biotoxins—constituted violations of U.N. Security Council resolutions barring such technology. However, we're beyond U.N. resolutions at this point. We're looking for evidence that Iraq actually did produce such weapons. From what we know so far, the trailers constitute less than airtight proof.

A U.S. Marine general, Lt. Gen. James Conway in a teleconference with reporters at the Pentagon said on Friday (30 May) U.S. intelligence was "simply wrong" in leading military commanders to believe their troops were likely to be attacked with chemical weapons in the Iraq war.

"We were simply wrong," he said of the assessment that chemical shells or other weapons were likely to be used by Iraqi forces. Such shells have not been found even in ammunition storage sites, he told reporters.

"It was a surprise to me then. It remains a surprise to me now that we have not uncovered weapons ... in some of the forward dispersal sites," said Conway.

"Believe me, it's not for lack of trying. We've been through virtually every ammunition supply site between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad. But they're simply not there."

The United States last night announced a major expansion of the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The Pentagon said the new Iraq Survey Group, a team of 1,400 US, British and Australian experts, would be led by US army Major General Keith Dayton. They will seek the weapons which the US and UK cited as the main justification for the invasion of Iraq which toppled Saddam Hussein.

The move was announced just hours after Lieutenant Gen James Conway said intelligence was "simply wrong" in leading the military to believe that the invading troops were likely to be attacked with chemical weapons. Meanwhile, Tony Blair continued to insist that chemical and biological arms would be found.

U.S. national security professionals are accusing the Bush administration of slanting the facts and hijacking the $30 billion intelligence apparatus to justify its rush to war in Iraq. A key target is a four-person Pentagon team, called themselves the Cabal, that reviewed material gathered by other intelligence outfits to tied Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to banned weapons or terrorist groups.

This team "cherry-picked the intelligence stream" in a bid to portray Iraq as an imminent threat, said Patrick Lang, a former head of worldwide human intelligence gathering for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) , which coordinates military intelligence.

The DIA was "exploited and abused and bypassed in the process of making the case for war in Iraq based on the presence of WMD," or weapons of mass destruction, he added in a phone interview. He said the CIA had "no guts at all" to resist the allegedly deliberate skewing of intelligence by a Pentagon that he said was now dominating U.S. foreign policy.

Vince Cannistraro, a former chief of Central Intelligence Agency counterterrorist operations, said he knew of serving intelligence officers who blame the Pentagon for playing up "fraudulent" intelligence, "a lot of it sourced from the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi."

"There are current intelligence officials who believe it is a scandal," he said in a telephone interview. They believe the administration, before going to war, had a "moral obligation to use the best information available, not just information that fits your preconceived ideas".

Australia's intelligence agency (ASIO) knew the United States was lying about Iraq's WMD programme. Australian intelligence agencies made it clear to the Australian Government all along that Iraq did not have a massive WMD program (that dubious honour remains restricted to at least China, France, India, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Syria, Britain and the US).

Nor was Saddam Hussein co-operating actively with al-Qaeda. And there was no indication Iraq was intending to pass WMDs to terrorists

..... Report after report from the bureaucracy made it abundantly clear that the US impatience to go for Iraq had very little to do with WMDs and an awful lot to do with US strategic and domestic interests.

Secret transcipts called the "Waldorf transcripts" are being circulated in Nato diplomatic circles. Dan Plesch and Richard Norton-Taylor (The Guardian UK) reports:

(The transcripts mentioned) Jack Straw and his US counterpart, Colin Powell, privately expressed serious doubts about the quality of intelligence on Iraq's banned weapons programme at the very time they were publicly trumpeting it to get UN support for a war on Iraq.

Their deep concerns about the intelligence - and about claims being made by their political bosses, Tony Blair and George Bush - emerged at a private meeting between the two men shortly before a crucial UN security council session on February 5. The meeting took place at the Waldorf hotel in New York, where they discussed the growing diplomatic crisis. The exchange about the validity of their respective governments' intelligence reports on Iraq lasted less than 10 minutes, according to a diplomatic source who has read a transcript of the conversation.

The foreign secretary reportedly expressed concern that claims being made by Mr Blair and President Bush could not be proved. The problem, explained Mr Straw, was the lack of corroborative evidence to back up the claims. Much of the intelligence were assumptions and assessments not supported by hard facts or other sources. It is not being revealed how the transcripts came to be made; however, they appear to have been leaked by diplomats who supported the war against Iraq even when the evidence about Saddam Hussein's programme of weapons of mass destruction was fuzzy, and who now believe they were lied to.

Mr Powell shared the concern about intelligence assessments, especially those being presented by the Pentagon's office of special plans set up by the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz. Mr Powell said he had all but "moved in" with US intelligence to prepare his briefings for the UN security council, according to the transcripts.

But he told Mr Straw he had come away from the meetings "apprehensive" about what he called, at best, circumstantial evidence highly tilted in favour of assessments drawn from them, rather than any actual raw intelligence. Mr Powell told the foreign secretary he hoped the facts, when they came out, would not "explode in their faces".

The transcripts will fuel the controversy in Britain and the US over claims that London and Washington distorted and exaggerated the intelligence assessments about Saddam's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programme.

British Government Ministers were accused of distorting the findings of the chief UN weapons inspector to support Britain's claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons programme. Amid growing anger among senior intelligence officials about Downing Street's use of their work for political ends, Hans Blix's office rejected claims by ministers that he had provided unequivocal evidence of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons programme.

Dr Blix's spokesman said the chief weapons inspector had "never asserted" that Iraq definitely had weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the conflict.

The armed forces minister, Adam Ingram, declared that the UN had provided "damning" evidence of illegal Iraqi weapons. Ewen Buchanan said Dr Blix had merely said there was a "strong presumption" that banned items such as an thrax still existed. Mr Buchanan's remarks will undermine the credibility of Downing Street.

Downing Street doctored the dossier on Iraq's weapons programme to make it "sexier", according to a senior British official, who claims intelligence services were unhappy with the assertion that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were ready for use within 45 minutes. The key claim in last September's dossier - that Iraq could launch a chemical or biological attack within 45 minutes of an order - had been inserted on the instructions of officials at No 10.

The unnamed official told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "Most people in intelligence weren't happy with the dossier because it didn't reflect the considered view they were putting forward."

Describing how it was "transformed" in the week before it was published to make it "sexier", he added: "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."

It's a... biggest State Lie of recent years . Of a campaign of manipulation probably waged in full knowledge of the facts, in any case, in spite of all the contrary indications, to make world public opinion believe that Iraq held and constructed weapons of mass destruction..... Donald Rumsfeld declared Tuesday that it was possible that the Iraqis had "decided to destroy (them) before the conflict"

. ...a beginning of a confession that the American and British authorities started a war in Iraq in March to "destroy" these weapons, while they enjoyed the quasi-certitude that those same weapons no longer existed at that date.

George W. Bush and Tony Blair are finding it harder and harder to maintain that they are "persuaded" of the existence of these weapons. The truth, which they knew, becomes apparent today: the war was not started to destroy these weapons, but to change the Baghdad regime and to begin the remodeling of the Middle East.

The weapons served only as a pretext. Faced with this State Lie, democracy demands that world opinion know the whole truth. Read here the original French version of this article.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia said Thursday if Iraq's weapons of mass destruction posed enough of a threat to justify war, they should have been found by now. Rockefeller, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, challenged comments by Bush administration officials that the weapons were well-hidden and may not be located soon.

"You can't quite say that it's going to take a lot more time if the intelligence community seemed to be in general agreement that WMD was out there,'' Rockefeller said in an interview. Rockefeller said that if the weapons were so well concealed, the United States should have considered giving U.N. inspectors more time to find them.

A group of former US intelligence officials has written to President Bush claiming that the US Congress and the American public were misled about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the war. Tim Reid (Times Online) reports:

The Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity group is headed by Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst for 27 years.

The group’s members, most of them former CIA analysts, say that they have close contacts with senior officials working inside the US intelligence agencies, who have told them that intelligence was “cooked” to persuade Congress to authorise the war.

The manipulation of intelligence has, they say, produced “a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions”.

They write in the letter to Mr Bush: “While there have been occasions in the past when intelligence has been deliberately warped for political purposes, never before has such warping been used in such a systematic way to mislead our elected representatives into voting to authorise launching a war. You may not realise the extent of the current ferment within the intelligence community and particularly the CIA. In intelligence, there is one unpardonable sin — cooking intelligence to the recipe of high policy. There is ample indication that this has been done in Iraq.”

The former CIA officials were supported by a current official in the Pentagon’s Defence Intelligence Agency, who told The New York Times yesterday: “The American people were manipulated.”

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