WMD just a convenient excuse for war, admits Wolfowitz
By David Usborne
30 May 2003
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.
Katherine Butler
Friday, May 30, 2003
''Getting used to fallen idols''
Printed on Thursday, May 29, 2003 @ 02:00:07 CDT ( )
By Marc Sirois
YellowTimes.org Columnist (Lebanon)
(YellowTimes.org) -- Discovering ugly flaws in one's idols is never a pleasant thing, but such experiences are a necessary fact of life that recur far more often than anyone would like. Children realize at some point that their parents are not infallible; students eventually detect weaknesses in even their most brilliant professors; and ambitious middle managers inevitably identify serious errors committed by the corporate saints who have guided their careers.
For a journalist who grew up admiring Ronald Reagan, getting to know Lebanon has been both painful and educational. I continue to believe that the Reagan Doctrine of going beyond containment actually to roll back the spread of Soviet influence was appropriate for the times. Victory in the Cold War demanded a vision like Reagan's, one that concentrated on the big picture and never lost sight of the ultimate goal. The Gipper was no genius, but look what a high IQ did for Bill Clinton. Instead, Reagan's leadership was based on a few guiding principles which he used as a battering ram. And it worked.
Unfortunately for places like Lebanon, however, blunt instruments tend to cause considerable damage when applied to international diplomacy. Living and working in this country has taught me just how obtuse the Reagan administration was in its policies here. Hoodwinked by the duplicitous tag-team of Ariel Sharon and Al Haig into ignoring the advice of professionals at the State Department, the White House essentially handed over the steering wheel to a militant government in Israel. We all know what happened next: Washington was widely identified as a supporter of a brutal invasion, snookered into taking sides in a civil war, and forced to leave with its tail between its legs. Its credibility across the Arab world was eroded in all aspects.
Fast-forward to the present day. The disgusting crimes of 9/11 yanked Americans from an unhealthy slumber, but the lessons that ought to have been drawn continue to be drowned out by a cabal of pundits and policymakers who grow more aggressive with each passing day. They have used justifiable popular anger over 9/11 to sell a wholly unnecessary war in Iraq whose long-term consequences can only be guessed at. Now the same sabers are rattling at Iran, Syria, and Lebanon's Hizbullah guerrilla group. All the while, they express varying levels of contempt and/or loathing for traditional allies like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. To make matters worse, they have sought and achieved a series of green lights for Sharon in his latest onslaught against the Palestinians.
One of the worst offenders in this regard is New York Times columnist Bill Safire, who does not even bother any longer to hide the fact that despite holding American citizenship, his loyalty is to those Israelis who espouse uber-Zionism. On Monday, May 26, Safire was at his temerarious best, examining why it was that Sharon had decided to "trust" George W. Bush over the "road map" to peace with the Palestinians. No less an authority than David Ben-Gurion described Sharon as a habitual liar, a judgment confirmed by sundry others who have worked with the portly former general. So how is it that he has any right to "grade" Bush's trustworthiness? And how is it that Safire has concluded anyone but Sharon has anything to prove in terms of being able to keep his word?
In addition to Safire's output, the American media arena is awash in the disingenuous pap published by an army of neoconservatives and Christian fundamentalists whose primary concern is to abet the activities of the Israeli far right. This serves neither America's interests nor Israel's, but that is irrelevant to these species.
Whether they try to disguise their leanings or not, the neocons are committed ideologically to a "Greater Israel" whose definition for some would see it stretch from the Nile to the Euphrates. For the sake of this grandiose ambition, they are perfectly willing to trample the rights of any and all Arab societies -- and to make America and her people the object of hatred across the Islamic world.
The Christian fundies follow a literalist/mystical dogma that sees the modern state of Israel as a harbinger of the "Second Coming." On this basis, they seek to affect U.S. foreign policy in such a manner as to arrange unconditional backing for whatever cockamamie idea Israeli hard-liners can come up with, especially those that might bring about the "Armageddon" which will precede Christ's return. Of course, at that point, Jews would apparently have to convert or suffer some kind of particularly nasty death, but that is a mere detail for people who want the government to help confirm the travel plans of their "Prince of Peace."
And still Americans ask: "Why do they hate us?"
Some of the more egregious answers have come from what used to be America's pre-eminent conservative magazine, National Review. Founded by William F. Buckley, the highly influential publication spent decades purging the legitimate rights of racists and religious bigots.
That worthy endeavor has been flushed down the toilet, though, by a neocon invasion. Essentially, they tell Americans that Muslims hate them because they are free, not because their government arms and finances the Muslims' mortal enemy, not because their government has offered diplomatic cover for that enemy to ignore dozens of U.N. Security Council resolutions for more than half a century, not because their government supplies the arsenal that enemy uses to pummel residential neighborhoods, not because their government looks the other way when that enemy violates with abandon both the spirit and the letter of the Geneva Conventions.
In short, the neocons have made National Review a vehicle for an agenda that has nothing to do with traditional American conservative values like fairness and the avoidance of what George Washington called "foreign entanglements." In so doing, they have joined with their allies in the Bush administration and hijacked the very foundations of what it means to be a conservative. Suddenly, traditional conservatives like Pat Buchanan are no longer part of the "mainstream"; instead, that title belongs to a tiny fringe of American Likudniks whose favorite pastime is the dissemination of lies and hatred. Conservatives like myself are censored, with many forced to find common cause with those on the left whose bizarre role now is to protect freedom of speech for their traditional ideological opponents.
But surely, not Buckley. He no longer runs National Review but still writes a regular column, and apart from being exceedingly well-argued, his views have always been couched in right reason. His advocacy of this or that Israeli policy was frequently accompanied by recognition that the Jewish state had to be restrained because its interests, real or perceived, are often nothing like America's. Even when he shared the neocons' opinions on a given topic, he neither stooped to their fallaciousness nor sullied himself in their vitriol.
Perhaps it was just a matter of time, but Buckley's own mind seems now to be in danger of being clouded by the same lot that has poisoned his magazine. His May 27 posting on National Review's website is entitled "Onward, Christian Missionaries" and avails that Christian proselytizing is just the sort of thing that can overcome extremism in the Islamic world.
After a meandering analysis built around the assumption that "confrontational exchanges" with Christian philosophers can cure that which ails Islam, Buckley concludes with the following: "Diplomacy is fine and is necessary but it sometimes demands politically correct professions of equality of faith, at the expense of right reason. Ronald Reagan saw through to this problem when he said that the Soviet Union was an evil empire and that Communism would end up on the ash heap of history. Something like that needs to be said about Muslims, to the extent that they are identifiable as agents of terrorism."
One expects such outrageous judgments from fanatics like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. But Buckley?
It hurts to see idols fall or even stumble. Reagan let Lebanon (and no small amount of other unfortunate lands) slip through the cracks to become "collateral damage" in his campaign to undo what Stalin and his buddies had wrought. To see Buckley slip up this way is no less painful, especially since he was one of the last bulwarks -- even if unwilling or unwitting -- against the invasion of the American right by a bastard ideology. If even he has now been infected, things are bound to get much, much worse before they get better.
[Marc Sirois is a Canadian journalist who lives in Beirut, Lebanon, where he serves as managing editor of The Daily Star.
Monday, May 12, 2003
Owner will dock workers for Bush's visit to Nebraska factory
Date: Monday, May 12 @ 10:04:11 EDT
By Mike Allen, Boston Globe
SANTA FE -- About 340 workers at an Omaha plastics factory will lose pay or have to work next Saturday to make up for time lost during a visit by President Bush today to promote his "jobs and growth plan," their boss said this weekend.
Brad Crosby, president of Airlite Plastics Co., said about 170 of his workers will lose a full day's pay and another 170 will be docked for part of their pay for today unless they make up the time they spend attending Bush's speech.
Airlite, which will shut down for its first shift and part of the second shift to provide a photogenic backdrop for Bush's speech, will be the afternoon stop on a two-day swing by Bush to pressure senators to support a large tax cut as the measure heads to the Senate floor.
Bush will stand near a production line that makes polystyrene containers for shipping steak, vaccines, and other goods.
"Since we have another shift that will have to work, it would be difficult to just give credit to the people who didn't work while they were attending the event," Crosby said. "The really good option was just to offer the chance to work on Saturday. We feel that's a more fair approach."
Airlite's plans were reported in Saturday's Omaha World-Herald. It was the second time this week that Bush's aggressive schedule of photo opportunities brought unwanted publicity. Several Democrats on Capitol Hill complained last week that the president's May Day speech on an aircraft carrier had been a political use of military assets.
Crosby said he spoke to several of the company's 510 hourly workers about the decision, and they were not concerned.
A White House official declined comment except to say that Bush looks forward to talking to the people of Nebraska about his plan to "put money in their pockets." Bush said in his prerecorded radio address Saturday that his message in his travels next week "will be simple: The surest way to grow this economy and create jobs is to leave more money in the hands of the people who earn it."
In the Democratic response, Governor James E. McGreevey, N.J., called for a "return to the days of balanced budgets, responsible spending, and investments -- investments in education, roads, and small businesses."
The president and his wife Laura Bush are spending the weekend in Santa Fe at the home of Roland W. Betts, a New York developer who was a Bush fraternity brother at Yale University and his partner when he owned the Texas Rangers baseball team.
Highlighting different parts of his economic proposal, Bush will speak to small-business owners near Albuquerque today, then hold a roundtable with families at Airlite in Nebraska before heading to Indianapolis, where he will meet with seniors tomorrow. Bush's aides describe Omaha as the most crucial stop, since Senator Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, has become their top lobbying target on the tax-cut package.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
Owner will dock workers for Bush's visit to Nebraska factory
Date: Monday, May 12 @ 10:04:11 EDT
By Mike Allen, Boston Globe
SANTA FE -- About 340 workers at an Omaha plastics factory will lose pay or have to work next Saturday to make up for time lost during a visit by President Bush today to promote his "jobs and growth plan," their boss said this weekend.
Brad Crosby, president of Airlite Plastics Co., said about 170 of his workers will lose a full day's pay and another 170 will be docked for part of their pay for today unless they make up the time they spend attending Bush's speech.
Airlite, which will shut down for its first shift and part of the second shift to provide a photogenic backdrop for Bush's speech, will be the afternoon stop on a two-day swing by Bush to pressure senators to support a large tax cut as the measure heads to the Senate floor.
Bush will stand near a production line that makes polystyrene containers for shipping steak, vaccines, and other goods.
"Since we have another shift that will have to work, it would be difficult to just give credit to the people who didn't work while they were attending the event," Crosby said. "The really good option was just to offer the chance to work on Saturday. We feel that's a more fair approach."
Airlite's plans were reported in Saturday's Omaha World-Herald. It was the second time this week that Bush's aggressive schedule of photo opportunities brought unwanted publicity. Several Democrats on Capitol Hill complained last week that the president's May Day speech on an aircraft carrier had been a political use of military assets.
Crosby said he spoke to several of the company's 510 hourly workers about the decision, and they were not concerned.
A White House official declined comment except to say that Bush looks forward to talking to the people of Nebraska about his plan to "put money in their pockets." Bush said in his prerecorded radio address Saturday that his message in his travels next week "will be simple: The surest way to grow this economy and create jobs is to leave more money in the hands of the people who earn it."
In the Democratic response, Governor James E. McGreevey, N.J., called for a "return to the days of balanced budgets, responsible spending, and investments -- investments in education, roads, and small businesses."
The president and his wife Laura Bush are spending the weekend in Santa Fe at the home of Roland W. Betts, a New York developer who was a Bush fraternity brother at Yale University and his partner when he owned the Texas Rangers baseball team.
Highlighting different parts of his economic proposal, Bush will speak to small-business owners near Albuquerque today, then hold a roundtable with families at Airlite in Nebraska before heading to Indianapolis, where he will meet with seniors tomorrow. Bush's aides describe Omaha as the most crucial stop, since Senator Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, has become their top lobbying target on the tax-cut package.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
Saturday, May 10, 2003
Frustrated, U.S. Arms Team to Leave Iraq
Task Force Unable To Find Any Weapons
By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 11, 2003; Page A01
BAGHDAD -- The group directing all known U.S. search efforts for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is winding down operations without finding proof that President Saddam Hussein kept clandestine stocks of outlawed arms, according to participants.
The 75th Exploitation Task Force, as the group is formally known, has been described from the start as the principal arm of the U.S. plan to discover and display forbidden Iraqi weapons. The group's departure, expected next month, marks a milestone in frustration for a major declared objective of the war.
Leaders of Task Force 75's diverse staff -- biologists, chemists, arms treaty enforcers, nuclear operators, computer and document experts, and special forces troops -- arrived with high hopes of early success. They said they expected to find what Secretary of State Colin L. Powell described at the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 -- hundreds of tons of biological and chemical agents, missiles and rockets to deliver the agents, and evidence of an ongoing program to build a nuclear bomb.
Scores of fruitless missions broke that confidence, many task force members said in interviews.
Army Col. Richard McPhee, who will close down the task force next month, said he took seriously U.S. intelligence warnings on the eve of war that Hussein had given "release authority" to subordinates in command of chemical weapons. "We didn't have all these people in [protective] suits" for nothing, he said. But if Iraq thought of using such weapons, "there had to have been something to use. And we haven't found it. . . . Books will be written on that in the intelligence community for a long time."
Army Col. Robert Smith, who leads the site assessment teams from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, said task force leaders no longer "think we're going to find chemical rounds sitting next to a gun." He added, "That's what we came here for, but we're past that."
Motivated and accomplished in their fields, task force members found themselves missing vital tools. They consistently found targets identified in Washington to be inaccurate, looted and burned, or both. Leaders and members of five of the task force's eight teams, and some senior officers guiding them, said the weapons hunters were going through the motions now to "check the blocks" on a prewar list.
U.S. Central Command began the war with a list of 19 top weapons sites. Only two remain to be searched. Another list enumerated 68 top "non-WMD sites," without known links to special weapons but judged to have the potential to offer clues. Of those, the tally at midweek showed 45 surveyed without success.
Task Force 75's experience, and its impending dissolution after seven weeks in action, square poorly with assertions in Washington that the search has barely begun.
In his declaration of victory aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, President Bush said, "We've begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons, and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated." Stephen A. Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, told reporters at the Pentagon on Wednesday that U.S. forces had surveyed only 70 of the roughly 600 potential weapons facilities on the "integrated master site list" prepared by U.S. intelligence agencies before the war.
But here on the front lines of the search, the focus is on a smaller number of high-priority sites, and the results are uniformly disappointing, participants said.
"Why are we doing any planned targets?" Army Chief Warrant Officer Richard L. Gonzales, leader of Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha, said in disgust to a colleague during last Sunday's nightly report of weapons sites and survey results. "Answer me that. We know they're empty."
Survey teams have combed laboratories and munitions plants, bunkers and distilleries, bakeries and vaccine factories, file cabinets and holes in the ground where tipsters advised them to dig. Most of the assignments came with classified "target folders" describing U.S. intelligence leads. Others, known as the "ad hocs," came to the task force's attention by way of plausible human sources on the ground.
The hunt will continue under a new Iraq Survey Group, which the Bush administration has said is a larger team. But the organizers are drawing down their weapons staffs for lack of work, and adding expertise for other missions.
Interviews and documents describing the transition from Task Force 75 to the new group show that site survey teams, the advance scouts of the arms search, will reduce from six to two their complement of experts in missile technology and biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. A little-known nuclear special operations group from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, called the Direct Support Team, has already sent home a third of its original complement, and plans to cut the remaining team by half.
"We thought we would be much more gainfully employed, or intensively employed, than we were," said Navy Cmdr. David Beckett, who directs special nuclear programs for the team.
State-of-the-art biological and chemical labs, shrunk to fit standard cargo containers, came equipped with enough supplies to run thousands of tests using DNA fingerprinting and mass spectrometry. They have been called upon no more than a few dozen times, none with a confirmed hit. The labs' director, who asked not to be identified, said some of his scientists were also going home.
Even the sharpest skeptics do not rule out that the hunt may eventually find evidence of banned weapons. The most significant unknown is what U.S. interrogators are learning from senior Iraqi scientists, military industrial managers and Iraqi government leaders now in custody. If the nonconventional arms exist, some of them ought to know. Publicly, the Bush administration has declined to discuss what the captured Iraqis are saying. In private, U.S. officials provide conflicting reports, with some hinting at important disclosures. Cambone also said U.S. forces have seized "troves of documents" and are "surveying them, triaging them" for clues.
At former presidential palaces in the Baghdad area , where Task Force 75 will soon hand control to the Iraq Study Group, leaders and team members refer to the covert operators as "secret squirrels." If they are making important progress, it has not led to "actionable" targets, according to McPhee and other task force members.
McPhee, an artillery brigade commander from Oklahoma who was assigned to the task force five months ago, reflected on the weapons hunt as the sun set outside his improvised sleeping quarters, a cot and mosquito net set down in the wreckage of a marble palace annex. He smoked a cigar, but without the peace of mind he said the evening ritual usually brings.
"My unit has not found chemical weapons," he said. "That's a fact. And I'm 47 years old, having a birthday in one of Saddam Hussein's palaces on a lake in the middle of Baghdad. It's surreal. The whole thing is surreal.
"Am I convinced that what we did in this fight was viable? I tell you from the bottom of my heart: We stopped Saddam Hussein in his WMD programs," he said, using the abbreviation for weapons of mass destruction. "Do I know where they are? I wish I did . . . but we will find them. Or not. I don't know. I'm being honest here."
Later in the conversation, he flung the unfinished cigar into the lake with somewhat more force than required.
Team members explain their disappointing results, in part, as a consequence of a slow advance. Cautious ground commanders sometimes held weapons hunters away from the front, they said, and the task force had no helicopters of its own.
"My personal feeling is we waited too long and stayed too far back," said Christopher Kowal, an expert in computer forensics who worked for Mobile Exploitation Team Charlie until last week.
'The Bear Wasn't There'
But two other factors -- erroneous intelligence and poor site security -- dealt the severest blows to the hunt, according to leaders and team members at every level.
Some information known in Washington, such as inventories of nuclear sites under supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, did not reach the teams assigned to visit them. But what the U.S. government did not know mattered more than what it did know. Intelligence agencies had a far less accurate picture of Iraq's weapons program than participants believed at the outset of their search, they recalled.
"We came to bear country, we came loaded for bear and we found out the bear wasn't here," said a Defense Intelligence Agency officer here who asked not to be identified by name. "The indications and warnings were there. The assessments were solid."
"Okay, that paradigm didn't exist," he added. "The question before was, where are Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological weapons? What is the question now? That is what we are trying to sort out."
One thing analysts must reconsider, he said, is: "What was the nature of the threat?"
By far the greatest impediment to the weapons hunt, participants said, was widespread looting of Iraq's governmental and industrial facilities. At nearly every top-tier "sensitive site" the searchers reached, intruders had sacked and burned the evidence that weapons hunters had counted on sifting. As recently as last Tuesday, nearly a month after Hussein's fall from power, soldiers under the Army's V Corps command had secured only 44 of the 85 top potential weapons sites in the Baghdad area and 153 of the 372 considered most important to rebuilding Iraq's government and economy.
McPhee saw early in the war that the looters were stripping his targets before he could check them. He cut the planning cycle for new missions -- the time between first notice and launch -- from 96 to 24 hours. "What we found," he said, was that "as the maneuver units hit a target they had to move on, even 24 hours was too slow. By the time we got there, a lot of things were gone."
Short and powerfully built, McPhee has spent his adult life as a combat officer. He calls his soldiers "bubbas" and worries about their mail. "It ain't good" that suspect sites are unprotected, he said, but he refused to criticize fighting units who left evidence unguarded.
"You've got two corps commanders being told, 'Get to Baghdad,' and, oh, by the way, 'When you run across sensitive sites, you have to secure them,' " he said. "Do you secure all those sites, or do you get to Baghdad? You've got limited force structure and you've got 20 missions."
A low point came when looters destroyed what was meant to be McPhee's headquarters in the Iraqi capital. The 101st Airborne Division had used the complex, a munitions factory called the Al Qadisiyah State Establishment, before rolling north to Mosul. When a reporter came calling, looking for Task Force 75, looters were busily stripping it clean. They later set it ablaze.
An Altered Mission
The search teams arrived in Iraq "looking for the smoking gun," Smith said, and now the mission is more diffuse -- general intelligence-gathering on subjects ranging from crimes against humanity and prisoners of war to Hussein's links with terrorists.
At the peak of the effort, all four mobile exploitation teams devoted nearly full time to weapons of mass destruction. By late last month, two of the four had turned to other questions. This week, MET Alpha, Gonzales's team, also left the hunt, at least temporarily. It parted with its chemical and biological experts, added linguists and document exploiters and recast itself as an intelligence team. It will search for weapons if leads turn up, but lately it has focused on Iraqi covert operations abroad and the theft of Jewish antiquities.
The stymied hunt baffles search team leaders. To a person, those interviewed during a weeklong visit to the task force said they believed in the mission and the Bush administration accusations that prompted it.
Yet "smoking gun" is now a term of dark irony here. Maj. Kenneth Deal, executive officer of one site survey team, called out the words in mock triumph when he found a page of Arabic text at a former Baath Party recreation center last week. It was torn from a translated edition of A.J.P. Taylor's history, "The Struggle for Mastery in Europe." At a "battle update brief" last week, amid confusion over the whereabouts of a British laboratory in transit from Talil Air Base, McPhee deadpanned to his staff: "I haven't a clue where the WMD is, but we can find this lab."
Among the sites already visited from Central Command's top 19 are an underground facility at North Tikrit Hospital, an unconventional training camp at Salman Pak, Samarra East Airport, the headquarters of the Military Industrialization Commission, the Baghdad Research Complex, a storage site for surface-to-surface missiles in Taji, the Amiriyah Serum and Vaccine Institute, a munitions assembly plant in Iskandariyah and an underground bunker at the Abu Ghurayb Palace.
The bunker, toured several days later by a reporter, withstood the palace's destruction by at least two satellite-guided bombs. The bombs left six-foot holes in the reinforced concrete palace roof, driving the steel reinforcing rods downward in a pattern that resembled tentacles. The subsequent detonation turned great marble rooms into rubble.
But the bunker, tunneled deep below a ground-floor kitchen, remained unscathed. The tunnel dropped straight down and then leveled to horizontal, forming corridors that extend most of the breadth of the palace. Richly decorated living quarters were arranged along a series of L-shaped bends, each protected by three angled blast doors. The doors weighed perhaps a ton.
In a climate-control room, chemical weapons filters and carbon dioxide scrubbers protected the air and an overpressure blast valve stood ready to vent the lethal shock waves of an explosion. And a decontamination shower stood under an alarm panel designed to flash the message "Gas-Gaz."
"Is it evidence of weapons of mass destruction?" asked Deal. "No. It's probably evidence of paranoia."
"I don't think we'll find anything," said Army Capt. Tom Baird, one of two deputy operations officers under McPhee. "What I see is a lot of stuff destroyed." The Defense Intelligence Agency officer, describing a "sort of a lull period" in the search, said that whatever may have been at the target sites is now "dispersed to the wind."
All last week, McPhee drilled his staff on speeding the transition. The Iraq Survey Group should have all the help it needs, he said, to take control of the hunt. He is determined, subordinates said, to set the stage for success after he departs. And he does not want to leave his soldiers behind if their successors can be trained in time.
"I see them as Aladdin's carpet," McPhee told his staff. "Ticket home."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
Monday, May 05, 2003
President's favorite database company, Choicepoint Inc., has acquired
personal data on hundreds of millions of citizens in ten Latin American
countries without their knowledge or consent. Data includes Mexico's
Federal Electoral Register, details of drivers in Mexico City and
Columbia.
"This is a corporation that works hand in glove with, and is
politically connected to the administration, and does things that the
US dare not do," Greg Palast, who uncovered Choicepoint's role in the
2000 election, told The Register last week. Choicepoint had been
given a $67 million contract for data gathering on September 25, 2001.
The contract lasts until 2005.
"It's doing this everywhere," said Palast, "but in Mexico it was caught out,".
The scandal broke three weeks ago after an investigation by Mexican newspaper Milenio, although it received scant attention Stateside. But a report in today's Guardian should give it fresh impetus.
From the Guadalajara Times we learn that the company has been
active in Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras,
El Salvador and Nicaragua. However, the Times reports that
Choicepoint has discontinued its role in Argentina, "due to lack of
demand and a strict new law relating to privacy".
But ChoicePoint isn't shy about boasting of its Latino assets.
"You know the value of ChoicePoint's domestic data," begins a
2001sales brochure for its 'AutoTrack XP' product uncovered by privacy
group EPIC under the Freedom of Information Act. "Now you can locate
and identify business assets in foreign countries with ChoicePoint's
new International searches".
"ChoicePoint gives you the most comprehensive online International
data available, with individual and business information from Mexico,
Colombia, Argentina [oops? - ed.] Brazil and Costa Rica."
"ChoicePoint is the only vendor capable of providing online access to the following data sets and/or functionality:
a) complete listings of all Mexican, Columbian and Argentine citizens
b) inclusion of unlisted numbers in telephone files in Mexico, Brazil and Argentina
c) inclusion of Mexican vehicle and driver license data
d) complete listing of Columbian company data
e) inclusion of personal identification information for Brazilian business people
f) full usability in English language
(Go here [200kb PDF] and here [292kb PDF] for the documents.)
The second document records that the US Department of Justice paid $11m for "access to ChoicePoint databases."
Now, you might ask, doesn't the US have official agencies that are
supposed to undertake a much more focused version of this intelligence
gathering? Indeed, it does, and being conscientious government
agencies, the staff (in our experience) take information integrity
pretty seriously. The value that ChoicePoint's places on data integrity
is quite germane, as we shall see.
Who is Choicepoint Inc.?
In a letter to SEC last year, ChoicePoint described itself as "a
leading information company with a long history of developing products
and services for federal and state government agencies to locate
individuals, businesses, and assets and to authenticate individuals'
identities."
That long history goes back less than six years to August 1997,
when Choicepoint was spun off from Equifax, where it was Equifax's
Insurance Services Group.
An early earning statement described how "in business and
government markets" it provided services including "pre-employment and
drug testing, public records information, UCC search and filing."
A more recent statement is both fuzzier and warmer:
"ChoicePoint (NYSE :CPS) is the leading provider of identification
and credential verification services for making smarter decisions in
today's fast-paced world, serving the information needs of business,
government and individuals."
"ChoicePoint is committed to protecting personal privacy and
promoting the responsible use of information to help create a safer
world."
But ChoicePoint's credentials as a responsible user of information
were tested in its role in Florida, in the 2000 Election - a story
that's probably more familiar to readers outside the United States than
in.
ChoicePoint was given a contract to maintain Florida's electoral
rolls and conveniently managed to scrub as many as 91,000 voters most
of whom were poor or black. A complex and determined effort to disenfranchise a small number of people.
Standards body
But ChoicePoint has another role to play in a quite unexpected way.
It's the guardian of our commercial data integrity. The "Providing
Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism"
(PATRIOT) Act 2001 blessed the company as a kind of standards setter.
Banks have been instructed to issue data in a format ChoicePoint likes,
which will come as a surprise to the IETF, or the W3C, or OASIS, next
time a web standard has to be set. But there you go. And ChoicePoint
was singled out by name.
The commercial potential of this new PATRIOT-compatible standard was illustrated here by Sybase which is suddenly falling over itself to help the Homeland. Over at Choicepoint there's a handy compliance brochure
you can read advising you how to comply with the PATRIOT Act. And not to
complicate the picture too much, Marv Bush, one of the aforementioned
Bush family, channeled money to Sybase via his job as a VC at Winston
Partners. So you can see how they gamble, these Bushes.
With an essential part of US intelligence gathering now
privatized, which we didn't know before - what else does this tell us?
Palast reminds us that the state can now demand and control information
flows without a warrant. Which is one of those nice 'Thank You's' that
we expect. ®
Sunday Herald - 04 May 2003
US: 'Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction'
By Neil Mackay
The Bush administration has admitted that Saddam Hussein probably had no weapons of mass destruction.
Senior officials in the Bush administration have admitted that they would be 'amazed' if weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were found in Iraq.
According to administration sources, Saddam shut down and destroyed large parts of his WMD programmes before the invasion of Iraq.
Ironically, the claims came as US President George Bush yesterday repeatedly justified the war as necessary to remove Iraq's chemical and biological arms which posed a direct threat to America.
Bush claimed: 'Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. We will find them.'
The comments from within the administration will add further weight to attacks on the Blair government by Labour backbenchers that there is no 'smoking gun' and that the war against Iraq -- which centred on claims that Saddam was a risk to Britain, America and the Middle East because of unconventional weapons -- was unjustified.
The senior US official added that America never expected to find a huge arsenal, arguing that the administration was more concerned about the ability of Saddam's scientists -- which he labelled the 'nuclear mujahidin' -- to develop WMDs when the crisis passed.
This represents a clearly dramatic shift in the definition of the Bush doctrine's central tenet -- the pre-emptive strike. Previously, according to Washington, a pre-emptive war could be waged against a hostile country with WMDs in order to protect American security.
Now, however, according to the US official, pre-emptive action is justified against a nation which simply has the ability to develop unconventional weapons.